We love fall, don’t we, with its brisk air and blue skies. And, pumpkin-spice everything, everywhere—ubiquitous, and oh-so millennial.
“Sweater weather!” the girls all cry, as if it were the holiday season.
But the old man had no little experience with fall weather, growing up in the northeastern United States, and knew well that fall days also meant cold, damp, rainy days, the kind that soaked right down into you. He also remembered all those dreary days he had spent as a soldier and remembered the chills that ran down his spine whenever the runoff from his head gear dripped down thru the gap at his uniform collar. Thank God for the standard issue Army brown wool sweater he wore so often that it became a trademark for him. Most often when he wore it he got the inevitable smart alec question, “You cold?” He always gave the same dry answer. “Not any more.”
Still, he was quite certain that’s not what the girls meant by “sweater weather.”
"Yeah, brisk fall days are a wonderful thing," he thought, "as long as the sun is shining."
This fall day was muddled—it couldn’t decide whether it would be wet or dry, wouldn’t commit to cold or warm. It was just damp, and musty, and he felt it in his bones.
She asked, “Would you like me to make some soup?” She had remarked earlier that very day, sipping a steaming mug of chicken stock, how stock running down into your belly warmed you straight thru.
He shivered a little, not really cold, just filled with a shudder like the one you get when you say that someone must have stepped on your grave.
“Won’t that warm you?”
“Aye,” he said, now tempted to call her Lassie, in the best of his Welsh or Scottish heritage. He didn’t, of course. She was born and bred in the tropics, was still a young thing, she would never understand him.
He put those thoughts away, imagining himself instead in a thick cable-knit turtleneck sweater, like the kind Hemingway wore in the photo on the dust jacket of his old copy of "The Sun Also Rises".
“You know what would really warm a body on a nice fall day?” he asked. “A deep-dish apple pie, fresh from the oven, with a slice of cheddar cheese melting on the top of it.” He knew that was out of the question. “Or an apple crisp or an Apple Brown Betty. That should do it.”
Did she not know that cinnamon, and nutmeg, and clove, and apple were all the world needed to make things right, and that the ancients knew that long before there was ever a pumpkin spice latte?