Fall is hard to appreciate when you are younger because it always meant going back to school. Now it is the time of harvests, festivals, and the changing of the leaves if your region is so lucky. Dreadfully short, autumn is that transitional season that must be experienced before winter sets in. A few months ago I wrote how Dandelion Wine was a quintessential book of summer. Do any books do the same for autumn?
Sleepy Hollow comes to mind. Maybe partly because stories like this also preface the coming of Halloween, which is nearly smack in the middle of the season (and retailers have been reminding us of its coming since August). Hollow and those of Edgar Allan Poe are very different than what often passes as “horror” these days. Where the modern genre often tries to shock and scare, back in the day it was more psychological and creepy. Rather than being something you soon forgot, they were something to long ponder.
Perhaps the uniqueness of fall is meant to do the same: Remind us to slow down and stop and take look around us. Ponder and prepare.
See what is all around us for the very first time.
P.S. Perhaps you aren’t ready to say goodbye to summer yet. Check out Bradbury’s Farewell Summer.
And on 
Darrick Dean 