The Last Day of September - Ugh.

Many people in Ontario love the Fall season. The air is cooler and crisper, the leaves are now a multitude of colours, there's all kinds of Fall fairs around the province to entertain us, the kids are getting excited for Halloween, Tim Horton's unveils their line of pumpkin donuts and related products, and there are less tourists wandering around the waterfront areas.

I'm not one of those people.

I have never liked pumpkins, pumpkin pie, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin flavoured coffee, or anything having to do with pumpkins. At best, pumpkins are a mediocre fruit. I actually do enjoy a variety of squash (squashes, squashi??), pumpkins not being one of them. Of all the gourd-like squash, pumpkins are my least favourite. Pesonality-wise, pumpkins are gaudy and crass.

Fall fairs. They are a consolation prize. Hey, summer's over, enjoy standing around your community centre munching on apples or whatever else is harvested in your area, while talking to strangers wearing 20 year old windbreakers with some obscure hockey logo on them about how it was a really chilly morning and that deer hunting season is almost upon us (or perhaps it's moose hunting season - or maybe both, what do I know?).

Watching the geese fly overhead in large formations honking their way towards a warmer climate makes me a little sad. Their brains are much smaller than mine, but somehow they seem smarter than me. I'm staying, they are heading to warmer areas.

Colourful leaves, well yeah, they are pretty while they are still on the trees, but why can't they just disintegrate when they are done. Raking is raking, no matter what colour the leaves are.

Halloween also doesn't do very much for me. Giving candies to kids dressed up in cute costumes doesn't really make me dance for joy. Perhaps that makes me a little heartless. So be it.

Things get much, much worse when the clock moves back. It really does make a difference when it gets dark earlier. I don't enjoy the early nightfalls. It just makes a gloomy season that much more unbearable. Ugh, I need my sunlight, even if it is the watery winter-time variety of sunlight.

The worst thing about the Fall season is that it comes directly before winter. It is pretty much a build-up to winter. This is the time of year when we prepare for winter, and winter is very much on our minds. Enlightened people will always tell you to "live in the now" and not to worry about 'inevitable outcomes that we have no control over". Well, I didn't make it this far in life by being enlightened, so why start now?

Fall is very much like those times when you were a child and mom sent you to your room to "wait until your father gets home". Quite often the anticipation of the event is much worse than the actual event. The real punishment was the few hours that you had to sit, wait, and anticipate. The actual "talking to" is never quite that bad, and it's usually over pretty quickly.

I don't like winters very much either, but during those cold hard days of January and February I know that spring is not too far away, and I enjoy that. Right now spring seems like such a long way away, and it's a pretty long and hard slog to get there.