Ten on Labor Day: 10 things I look forward to about fall

And none of them are pumpkin spice lattes.

1. Pencils. Sharp pencils with erasers that are still mostly intact. The smell of a freshly sharpened pencil. Yes I teach math.

2. Crickets. The windows are open now at night and I hear the crickets. I'm sure they are out there during the summer but I'm not.

3. Orange + blue = beautiful

4. Maybe I'll knit something. Sometimes it happens, but the hope that it will happen is more perennial.

5. Slipping on a cardigan in the morning before I walk out the door in the gray dusk (instead of the already bright humid sunshiny morning)

6. Fires. Intentional ones, I mean, in fireplaces or firepits or campground rings. In the summer these are oppressive, even if you are forced to have them to heat up food on a camping trip. But in the fall they are lovely, wood smoke lingering on your clothes and in your hair.

7. Girl scout camp. I'm probably on the edge of this just being a memory of fall instead of something I look forward to. But I love driving down to Pevely or up to Troy and pulling up to the comfortable sagging camp structures and having tame adventures together.

8. Porch sitting. I like it when the mosquitoes go away and I can sit for a long while, day or night, on the porch watching the world go by.

9. Harvest Moon and Hunters Moon.

10. Sunflowers and sagging gardens and seed heads and the smell of the prairie and then that first frost finally and all is gray.