It’s a really strange feeling to see school starting all around me and not be involved in any way. We don’t even get busier at work around this time of year—things are exactly the same. It wasn’t that long ago that the calendar year was all but irrelevant, and instead the academic year was how I marked the passing of time. And now, despite the fact that I’m not going back to school—not getting a new schedule, new books, new pens, new crayons, new boxes of kleenex for the classroom—it still feels like this is the time of year, not spring, when we all get a clean slate. When we start something new and begin again. Maybe it’s because I’ve long considered fall to be the true beginning and end of a year that I see it this way, as a transition; but, without classes starting, all that forward momentum feels misplaced.

As seasons go, fall is still my favorite, but it has a lot of weirdness too. That combination of fresh starts and things dying, summer coming to a close. Every summer we all have so many hopes and expectations—spend every day outside, lose 10 pounds, get a tan, go to the beach—but in reality, hardly any of it happens. Any usually by the time I’ve reconciled that fact— the fleeting, transitory nature of summer—it’s fall.

I love the weather in September and October, especially during thunderstorms, but embracing fall means embracing its melancholic side too. And not in the way of taking the good with the bad, cutting your loses and making the best out of it, but genuinely enjoying the end, the death, and the darkness. I don’t mean to sound so macabre, because there’s something optimistic about relishing the coming of the agent of change and not just the end result. The common consensus seems to be that spring is the time for rebirth, resurrection etc. and all of that is well and good, but it wouldn’t be possible, or have quite the same impact, without winter first cutting everything back to the most naked and bare, purest and clean state—back to the start. And fall is the beginning of that. The new, tender shoots that emerge from the fertile ashes of a forest fire make everyone else feel hopeful, and maybe it’s overly idealistic of me to see the optimism in destruction, but I like the fire. It’s the promise of renewal, rather than the actualization of renewal itself, where I find hope.