Season of Mixed Blessings

There's something you should know about me. I hate the fall. The common response I usually get when making that blanket statement is either:

"How can you hate a whole season?"

or

"But it's so pretty in the fall!"

I agree. It is pretty. I also agree that it's insane to hate an entire quarter of every year, but that's just the way it is. Everything bad that has ever happened in my life, from breakups to deaths in the family to car accidents, have happened in the fall. Winter is often depicted as the season of death, but death is peaceful. Death is serene. When it comes down to it, people aren't really afraid of death, they're afraid of dying. The fall is the season of dying. It's the season when everything alive (at least at this latitude) rolls up and calls it a year.

There is only one thing that saves this time of year for me. Okay, not only one thing, but one thing that does it every year, and every time I realize it, I feel incredibly shallow for how happy it makes me. That thing, that savior of all Autumn, is, of course, eggnog.

I love eggnog. I rarely eat eggs and I only grudgingly drink milk, but somehow the natural midpoint between these two things, eggnog, managed to become my favorite drink in the world. I love it to such an extent that if it was a person, and we weren't, um... intimate, eggnog would slap a restraining order on me and push me back to 200 feet. I have had long debates with friends about the injustice of the fact that eggnog is only available in the fall. The duality of my favorite thing being exclusive to my least favorite time is pleasing in a way, but disturbing as well. Without egg nog, would falls be even worse? Or is the silver lining the dust that allowed the cloud to form in the first place?

Oh well. Happy Autumn, to those of you that enjoy it. Happy nog season, to the rest.