Not trying to be a basic white girl here, but ever since I moved from New York to go to college in Florida three years ago, I grew to have a real appreciation for this in-between season that sometimes gets overlooked. Now I’m not saying that we don’t get a type of fall down in Florida, it just isn’t the same as fall in the northeast. Yes, we get the slightly colder temperatures (where you can wear sweaters and boots), and yes, pumpkin spice is on your neighborhood Starbucks menu and football season does happen, but we miss out on a lot of the best parts of fall.
Overall, I sometimes miss the cold weather. Down here it’s hot, and I’m not talking about hot as in sweating because you're tanning at the beach all day, I’m talking about how you walk outside for one second and your dripping kind of hot. In Florida, and particularly where I am, we don’t really get a change in temperature until late November-early December, and still when I say that, I’m talking about how it maybe reaches the low 70's, high 60's. So yes, every once in a while I miss those 50 degree days where running outside doesn’t make me look like I just went swimming!
The leaves don’t change color down here. I miss how it looked as they changed color, from the greenery of summer to the dusty ambers, oranges, burgundies, reds, and browns of fall. And probably my favorite as a kid (even nowadays I would still do it), is raking them into a huge pile and jumping into them.
In general, you can’t go picking, be it pumpkin picking, apple picking, or whatever kind of picking you do, it just is not done in Florida. If you’re desperate enough you can go pick a pumpkin in a parking lot, but never in a patch. And you don’t get to have all those homemade goodies that are made from those picking days like apple pie or apple fritters or bake apples or apple cider or pumpkin scones or pumpkin seeds or pumpkin pies and the list goes on (if you can’t tell I have a sweet tooth)!
There are absolutely no corn fields. So no chance of you running around in a corn maze, getting lost, or going on those haunted maze tours at night. That also means no roasted corn to eat on hay rides with the family either. (Although if you want to see some cow or orange fields Florida’s got plenty of those).
And football games are just not the same. Yes, we do still have them and it’s great to be able to wear a t-shirt and shorts to your favorite game, but it just doesn’t feel right. I’m used to wearing some jeans, sometimes even two layers, with a scarf and hat and heading down to the game with a hot chocolate in my hand. Kind of hard to do that when it’s still 80 degrees down here.
So as you can tell I may be a Florida girl now, but I will forever be a New York girl at heart missing that fall season when everyone else wants it to still be in summer.
