Fall.

It's officially fall. Thanksgiving is this week (and sadly, that also means the closing of the seasonal farmer's market. I really wish this neighborhood had a good specialty butcher and a good specialty baker...and this is a wealthy neighborhood).

Oddly, our landlords haven't emptied the pool yet. Which is weird...and not smart as its now full of dead leaves.

In truth. I'm a spring and fall person. I used to be a summer person then I moved here...and summer is just a few degrees colder than hell here, and even worse in the true south. Fall is a soft falling off of things. This year has been quiet. Next year...is going to be another matter (I may have as many as three major projects come to fruition). I'm nervous about it, to be honest.

Actually, I sort of like winter too. My husband keeps threatening to haul me up to Minnesota in the dark middle of winter so I can learn what winter is really like. Several feet of snow. Shiver.

The seasons define our life in a way, outside the tropics. One has to wonder how lives might be defined on other worlds. What sort of culture, for example, would develop on a world with no axial tilt, and thus no seasons?

Brian Aldiss' Helliconia addresses life on a world where each season lasts several human lifetimes. And, of course, winter IS coming in A Song of Ice and Fire, where the world has variable-length summers and winters, but each lasts a few years. (Of course, ASOIAF is fantasy, so Martin can get away with never really explaining how this comes to be, but one has to guess it's related to the magical disasters of the past).

What kind of seasons do your fantasy worlds have?