Not everyone has to become a fall guy

I won’t be going to Vermont this fall. Or any fall. I wouldn’t go any place where I might be called a “peeper.” Yet 3.5 million people go to Vermont every fall to look at dying leaves. That’s about six tourists for every resident.

I hate fall. It’s summer’s funeral. And I love summer. In Vermont, there are fall foliage reports posted daily by the “Leaf Squad.” You can’t make this stuff up. These are volunteers who post pictures from locations around the state, so people can plan where to do their leaf peeping.

According to the Vermont tourism site, the big stars in the foliage festival are the red and sugar maple trees, which make up more than 50% of the state’s forests. I have plenty of 100-year-old maple trees in my yard, here in my inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. They are just starting to turn a bit red and orange. But that doesn’t look beautiful to me; it looks like work. If leaves were people, my yard would be a giant hospice center. They’re dying, hundreds of thousands of little bodies, falling all over my yard. I’ll have to clean them all up.

Pumpkins, sweaters and tires. Oh, my.

But there’s more to hate about fall than the leaves. Pumpkin. A giant, tasteless canvas for nutmeg, which is not a star of the spice rack for a reason. It tastes like perfumed soap. Which is the last thing I’d want in my latte. And yet. Starbucks has sold 500 million pumpkin spice lattes since introducing the drink two decades ago.

Here’s a fall phrase I detest: sweater weather. Sweaters are made of wool, a scratchy fiber early humans learned to knit together in order to stay alive when the dying leaves warned them that a season of darkness was almost upon them.

I think the best weather is T-shirt weather. And let’s talk tires. Fall is the time to check the tread and be sure you’re prepared for the death match that is also called winter driving. I hate getting new tires, especially when my current “70,000 mile tire” is tread bare at 30,000 miles.

Back-to-school blues

Have you ever heard full-grown adults waxing nostalgic about the first day of school, which is the ultimate harbinger of fall? They go on and on about how excited they were with their 64-count box of crayons, all new and shiny, their paper wrappers still intact. And the new folders and binders and keepers. It’s the promise of a fresh start.

But that’s all just revisionist history. The first day of school meant our great escape was over. We had been apprehended in our imaginary forts, forcibly removed from baseball fields, torn away from friends, scrubbed and polished and stuffed into long pants and hard shoes and forced to march carrying the weight of all those new notebooks on our backs into that rigid, rulebound institution. The furlough was over. We were back in prison. The world we loved was outside those windows, and all we could do was watch the leaves dying. I hate fall.

Jim Sollisch is a partner and executive creative director for the advertising agency Marcus Thomas LLC in Cleveland.