Pumpkin spice aroma signals end to holiday from holidays

Brian was the first to blink. My husband and I were at the checkout stand at the Safeway in Diamond Heights. I was loading Cocoa Krispies and oat milk onto the conveyor belt, because we still check out with a human at the register. It seems more personal that way.

He gave me that guilty look and said, “I just need to go get one more thing.” By the time he returned, the ground turkey, Rice-a-Roni and other stuff had been rung up and filled our Avengers reusable grocery bags. Brian tried to sneak them onto the scanner, but I saw: two white kitchen towels with little orange pumpkins.

August was officially over, the summer gone, and what our friend Sasb calls “Decorative Gourd Season” had begun. Over at the Starbucks station, I sniffed the air and found the aroma of pumpkin foam slathered over steamed coffee.

The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is 18 years old this year. To make it taste like pumpkin pie, there’s cinnamon, nutmeg and clove (my pie’s secret ingredient remains safe). And although the drink was invented in 2003, it wasn’t until 2015 that someone thought of adding pumpkin puree, because — what the heck? — everybody likes liquefied produce in their morning coffee.

(This year, it’s accompanied by the Apple Crisp Macchiato, known to my son Aidan as the Apple Macho.)

At Starbucks — and virtually every other coffee place — pumpkin season runs from the end of August until eggnog latte and peppermint mocha season begin in late fall.

I’m gonna sound like the Ebenezer

Scrooge of Halloween. As readers know, I love Victoria and Victor and all the other psychic baristas at the Starbucks on Portola, but I’ve come to resent the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Not for its taste (I’ve never actually tried one) but for what it represents: the end of the nonholiday season.

Here’s the thing: I’ve talked about my husband and his multiple holiday villages (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter and Independence Day), each one also requiring a different wreath on the front door. Our kitchen towels go from sporting turkeys to poinsettias to hearts to clovers to bunnies to flags. Each decor has its own color-coordinated storage box in the garage. Frankly, it’s exhausting.

We don’t have actual changes of seasons in California. We go from drought to drought, with a week of cloudiness that might actually turn into rain. The only way to know that time passes in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior is to look at the holiday wreath on the Bedlam Blue Bungalow, or the decoration worn by the roof cow down the block.

But mercifully, each year there’s this monthlong break when the roof cow is naked and the potholders are undecorated. No saltshakers shaped like turkeys, no artificial snow on the mantel.

In August we take a holiday from the holidays. Brian and I cherish that time when there are surfaces in the dining room unobstructed by manger scenes or Easter baskets. Comes in very handy for displaying pictures of the boys. Or just stacking laundry.

In the Catholic Church, you’ve got all the religious holidays, and you’ve got what the church calls Ordinary Time. During that nonseason, the priest wears green, and you don’t need to dress up. In our home, August is Ordinary Time.

So each year, my husband and I wait to see who will be the first to blink, knowing that the moment we admit it’s autumn, we have to drag up the 10 cartons of skeleton decorations and figure out whether Aidan or Zane will still need that Captain America costume. Inevitably, sometime around Labor Day, one of us slips.

Usually, it’s me. By this time each year, I’ve written a back-to-school column, an event that serves as a stand-in for the leaves turning color. But this year I skipped the return-to-Riordan report, worried I might jinx it and all the schools would close again. I imagined that might mean we could squeeze out an extra day or two of Ordinary Time.

But at Safeway, the towels got rung up. Aidan and Zane nodded. Brian smiled. We should know by now: it’s never Ordinary Time with the Fisher-Paulsons. It’s always extraordinary.

August was officially over, the summer gone, and “Decorative Gourd Season” had begun.