Fall in Seattle

I am very happy to have a guest poster for this morning.  She is going to be talking about fall which is my favorite season 🙂

A Girl is a 20 something blogger who began blogging in 2008 as a means of coping with a deployment.  She is a Veterinary Technician by trade and loves her work in Emergency and Critical Care.  She is married to a USMC reservist with 10 years of service, whom she met shortly after he returned from a deployment.  They have been married for four years, have three, very bratty dogs, and are currently trying to muddle through the aftermath of a difficult deployment for both.  You can find her blog at A Boy, A Girl , and The Marine Corps!

There is something about fall in Seattle.  Our summer is only a month long at best, our winter is two if we are lucky, and most of the rest of the year is spent in a perpetual springtime.  So, for a few months a year, I have this amazing time called “Fall in Seattle”, which is unlike fall any other place.  It is a time of grey skies, and clouds that are not ominous, but welcoming.  They stretch across the horizon, obscuring the sun and moon, but wrapping our lives in a protective layer that prevents the temperature from ever being too hot or too cold, but a gentle chill that invigorates the senses.

This September was unseasonably warm.  There is no reason in the world it should ever be over 80 degrees in Seattle more than one day a year, let alone for the entire first 17 days of what I have come to regard as the month that I look forward to most.  It is September that marks a truly hit or miss daily weather forecast.  It may be sunny and warm, it may be sunny and raining, or it might ice over.  And the weatherman doesn’t know any better than you do what it might be, and the Weather Gods don’t care if it does all of those things in course of just 24 hours.

And then fall comes… all at once.  You wake up one morning and all the leaves are brown, then the next day they are gone.  And that is fall in Seattle, if you are lucky enough to see it happen at all.  So I don’t think of fall as the time of year to enjoy the changing of the leaves and the rustle of them in the wind, most of our trees are green all year round anyway.

But what I do think of is fog.  I think of rains washing through the city, cleansing us of our summer sins, nourishing the landscapes as the flowers are replaced with soft earth and grass that never dies, but simply stops growing.  I think of mornings spent drinking warm tea, and the ridiculous clothing you will see only in Seattle, where moist weather gear is as much a fashion statement as it is a functional part of your wardrobe.

Though it is never truly very dry here, the air becomes so moist, that outsiders mistake it for rain.  A fine mist looms in the air and you can become damp simply by walking to your car, even without a raindrop in sight.  Dew forms on the tips of pine trees, creating the glassy look of a flash rainstorm.  The sidewalks never quite dry, the ground never stops sloshing under your feet and the smell of the air is always clean.

You don’t see many umbrellas, which is how you can tell the tourists, the transplants and other non-natives from the locals, or those who have lived here long enough to know better.  You won’t see rain boots, unless they are covered with bright, multi-colored polka dots (as mine are), or rubber duckies or other such non-sense.  And to be honest, I didn’t even own a pair of rain boots until I needed them for school because we were going to a dairy farm. I have not worn them in at least 2 years, the last time being when I used to have to walk through the mud to catch the horse I rode for my riding lesson.  Because even though we all own them (or most of us do), we really don’t see the reason to change shoes just because it’s wet.

If you ask people about Fall most will cite amazing quotes about the leaves turning color on the East Coast, where the trees are not green all year round.  You will hear talk of crisp breezes and the feeling that winter is almost here…  But for me, winter is not the time of year I look forward to the most.  I grew up in Seattle.  It means that I have never really experienced much in the way of a gentle change in weather as the leaves turn color and fall to the ground in preparation for winter.  Instead, I’ve been lucky enough to experiences lush hills that line our freeways as I laugh that even born and raised here, most still can’t drive when the streets are wet, and I can look out my windows and not be sure if it’s morning or evening because my world has been tinted by grey colored glasses for days.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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