The pumpkin spice industrial complex has fully mobilized, your Instagram feed is nothing but golden-hour tree photos, and somewhere on your street a guy named Doug is firing up a gas leaf blower at 7:45 on a Saturday morning like he's trying to summon a demon.
Welcome to autumn in America, the one season we all pretend to love because the other three are either too hot, too cold, or tax season.
Here's the thing nobody admits: fall is objectively the most overrated season, and I say this as a person currently wearing a flannel.
The leaves are pretty for about nine days.
Then they turn brown, get rained on, and become a slippery death carpet on every sidewalk from Maine to Oregon.
Your car looks like it lost a fight with a compost bin.
And yet we romanticize the whole thing like it's a Nora Ephron movie.
We drive two hours to "leaf peep," which is just sitting in traffic to look at trees that are dying.
We pay $8 for a latte that tastes like a candle.
We buy decorative gourds, which are just vegetables with a marketing degree.
Then comes the great American tradition of arguing with your neighbors about how to deal with the leaves.
Some people just leave them there and let God sort it out, which enrages the rakers to a degree usually reserved for political yard signs.
Let's talk about the leaf blower for a second, because it deserves its own true-crime documentary.
It's loud enough to wake the dead and somehow still only moves leaves from one part of your lawn to your neighbor's.
It runs on a thimble of gas and the pure spite of a retired man with nothing else on his calendar.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are out here raking like peasants in a medieval painting, wondering why we chose a hobby that punishes us with back pain and a single blister that never heals right.
The city offers "leaf pickup" on a schedule that makes no sense, so you pile everything at the curb, a truck comes three weeks later, and half of it has already blown back onto your lawn.
The air smells like woodsmoke and someone else's chili.
Sweaters hide the fact that you've given up on your summer body.
Football gives you a legitimate excuse to sit on a couch for six hours and yell at strangers.
And there's something genuinely nice about a season that basically tells you to slow down and go to bed at 8 p.m. like a Victorian child with consumption.
Holidays are coming too, which means family, which means someone is going to bring up politics over pie.
Fall is just the calm before that particular storm.
The leaves are falling, the vibes are immaculate for roughly one more week, and Doug is still out there.
He will be out there until the first snow.
God bless America, and God bless that leaf blower. **The take:** Fall is a beautiful lie we tell ourselves to survive the fact that winter is about to ruin everything for five months.
Final Thoughts
Rake if you want, blow if you must, but leave Doug alone — he's the only one who seems happy.