Fall comes with a healthy dose of nostalgia. Autumn was always an exciting season for me growing up — leaf catching, pumpkin patches, corn mazes, jack-o’-lantern carving and so much more. One of the challenges of college is the feeling of our childhoods slipping farther and farther away. But this year, I committed to preserving childhood traditions and creating some new ones.
New England’s fall is truly something to behold. The beauty of leaves turning from green to fire red to gold before falling to the ground for the perfect crunch as you walk over them is something I will never forget. There is a strange mundaneness to something so extraordinary that occurs every year. My childhood friend and I would spend hours trying to catch the falling leaves. The goal was to catch seven in a row, and if you went for one and missed, you have to start from the beginning. (To those who have never played a leaf-catching game, you should, and it’s harder than it sounds.)
Walking across the bridge outside of the Dining Hall invokes the same feeling of ordinary yet stunning natural beauty as the leaves turn yellow and orange. Whenever I walk down the bridge, I try to take a moment to appreciate it and miss the time I spent as a kid catching leaves as they fall around me.
The fall leaves here are different, more gold than bright red, but they are still something to appreciate. This year, my roommates and I took a trip around the Blue Ridge Parkway as the leaves began to turn. With the mountains turning blue and purple in the setting sun, the streaks of red and pink in the sky, and of course, the freshly golden leaves, I experienced an entirely different kind of beauty that I never had in Connecticut. We created new memories to accompany my childhood ones that I will never forget. (We went a lot farther away from campus than intended and took an unpaved backroad on the way back in complete darkness. There was a lot of yelling and laughing but we saw the best moon rise. Worth it.)
Pumpkin carving was another staple of my childhood. When I was a little kid, my parents would take me and my sister to a pumpkin patch, and we would come home to sit on a newspaper laid out on the kitchen floor. My dad would clean out the pumpkins for us, and my sister and I would carve away. As I got older, I became a part of an intense competition with my neighbor and her family. We would set up shop in their basement and get impartial judges to come by and anonymously pick a winner. The carving was intense. There are still contested winners. One, in particular, I will never accept: (*cough, cough*) Mr. Crowley and his Picasso “carving” that was no longer a pumpkin but pumpkin pieces nailed to a board.
This year, I lured my roommates into our own pumpkin carving session sitting on the floor in our living room with a Halloween movie in the background. It was far less intense, but a cute moment of roommate bonding that invoked a form of nostalgia for all of us.
Of course, there are other Lexington-specific fall activities to take advantage of — bread day, football games (I went to my first college football game at VMI this year), hiking and corn mazes — that I fully recommend taking advantage of. The point is, as we move through our young adulthood, we can renew traditions and make new ones fill the weekends with some of that childish joy that we often have let slip away in the stress of classes and exams.
