I and Love and You.

The air is crisp, the days grow shorter, the sunlight isn't as intense as it was just a few months ago. The leaves change color, there's the smell of smoke in the air, the suggested coziness of hunkering down under a pile of blankets with a good book.

I like the fall. I drink more tea, I bundle up with a few more layers, the crock pot comes out on Sunday mornings more often. It's cozy. I linger over the Sunday paper with a hot cup of coffee, I pick up the books I dub "cold weather reads" more eagerly. Songs like this one make me pause, smile. I pull on tights and boots, put away the flip-flops and my summery dresses.

Yet this time of year also always makes me nostalgic, a bit sad, a tinge melancholy. I suppose part of it is the slowing down after a hectic summer, coupled with the knowledge that we'll soon all be hunkering down for a long (long) winter's night.

I miss my family, always, but I seem to miss them the most during the fall. I crave things, moments that I took for granted for so many years when I was young. I think of my Mom, who always bought mums and pumpkins for the front door of our house. I picture my Dad, donning the same navy blue down jacket he's had for as long as I've known him raking leaves, or letting a blast of cool air in through the back door when he'd walk into the living room on a weekend night, pizza box in hand, singing "When the moon hits your eye, like a big-a-pizza-a pie..."

I think of my brother and our next door neighbors piling into the back of the old red and white 1978 Scout my father maintained. Halloween was one of the few times we were allowed to ride in the back. The four of us would sit there, in our costumes, clutching our empty orange baskets. Dad would drive about 1/2 a mile, parking at the end of a neighborhood street. We'd make the rounds, all four of us, ringing door bell after door bell, Dad trailing a few feet behind us. Then we'd all pile back into the Scout, already trading loot under the dim glow of the streetlights we drove past.

Those moments, those times, they happen every year, always. But then, one year they don't. We get too old or too "cool" for trick or treating. We suddenly meet up with friends on a Friday night instead of crowding around the television eating pizza on the night Mom wants off from cooking duty. Of course you don't realize it when it's happening, as the moments, the differences unfolding are subtle. There is a time when we yearn for change, we long to reach and live outside the safe shelter of our homes. We grow our wings, we leave the nest.

Life keeps moving. We keep going, yet I always find myself taking a moment to look back, to remember, to embrace my nostalgia - especially as the seasons change, the leaves tumble, the nights grow long for another year.