The Dreamer's Pen

When I was little, every season in Washington carried its own kind of magic.

Summer was blackberry stained fingers and stubborn sunsets that lingered long after bedtime. Spring was cherry blossoms scattered across wet sidewalks, tulips rising out of soggy earth. Winter was snow on the Cascades, holiday lights against dark evergreens, breath curling white in the cold.

And fall, oh how fall was my favorite. It was leaves gathered in piles, roadside apple stands, the smell of smoke curling from chimneys. The air felt sharper, clearer, charged with possibility. Every season had its wonder, but fall was the one that felt like a storybook.

But now, fall is the season I brace for.

Because Washington’s fall is not the crisp autumn of storybooks. It is gray. It is damp. It is a wet cold that seeps into your clothes and bones and refuses to leave. The sky folds inward, light drains away, and rain settles in with the persistence of someone who doesn’t know when to go home.

I hate it.

I hate the gray that erases the horizon and makes morning indistinguishable from evening. I hate the damp air that clings to my skin and hair as though the whole world is quietly weeping. I hate how the cold here doesn’t feel bracing or invigorating, but instead slow and heavy, like a weight pressed down on the chest.

And it doesn’t help that fall is also the season that carries the hardest pieces of my life. I lost my mother in the fall. Other traumas followed, as though drawn to the same season, until grief itself felt braided into the weather. My body remembers before my mind does: the tilt of the light, the shortening of the days, and with it, the ache in my chest. Fall feels like a ghost season.

If I had to give it a soundtrack, fall in Western Washington would sound like a never ending composition by Angelo Badalamenti. Haunting. Slow. Laced with beauty, but threaded through with unease. The kind of music that makes you feel both held and unsettled at once melodies that echo like footsteps in a fog. That’s how the season moves through me: atmospheric, melancholy, and endless. The Twin Peaks experience! And so, I brace for it. Every year.

But this year, I am trying something different.

Not pretending to love it. Not forcing myself into pumpkin colored cheer. But also not surrendering entirely to dread. I am trying to make space in the gray for something else for light, for ritual, for joy that insists on existing even in the dampest months.

That means lamps before dusk and candles flickering against the dark. Tea steeped so strong it feels like a small hearth in my hands. Opera tickets penciled into the calendar, because I want to sit in a velvet seat and let music rise through my ribcage. Jazz concerts, where rain transforms into rhythm and swing. Soup nights with friends. Bookstore afternoons where the smell of paper feels like oxygen.

It means walking anyway. Even when the trail is slick with rain and my hood does nothing to keep me dry. Because moss glows brighter under gray skies, and cedars breathe sharper when the air is wet. The mist here doesn’t erase, it layers. It reveals slowly: crow, fern, alder, silence.

And it means rebellion. Red scarves against dull skies. Lipstick as vivid as the leaves. Carrying citrus in my bag like tiny suns. Choosing brightness on purpose. Refusing to let the season blur me into its monotone.

The truth is, none of this cancels grief. None of this changes the fact that I hate the damp, the endless gray, the long wet months of cold air. But it does mean fall no longer gets to write only one story in my life. It does not get the final say.

When I feel myself bracing, I remember the child I once was, the girl who stuffed leaves in her pockets as if they were treasure. She’s still here, tugging on my sleeve, asking me to notice, to collect, to find beauty hidden under sorrow.

Maybe I’ll never love fall again. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the work now is to live it, not to resist it. To hear the Badalamenti soundtrack in the background and not run from it, but add my own melody, lighter, stubborn, luminous.

Yes, I am still bracing. But I am also resisting. And in that resistance, in those small defiances against the gray, I am building something like magic.