Life Update: Fall-ing In Love

 The older I'm getting, the more I find myself liking autumn. This makes it sound like I'm actually old, when I'm literally in my early twenties, but you get the point. When I was a teenager, I used to despise this season. I guess it reminded me of the school year starting too much, so the entire period of autumn got a bad name. But as I am growing and finding what it's like to have your own life as an adult, fall is becoming a time I'm more excited to experience year after year. 

One thing I really love about living in Finland is that we get to experience all four seasons – at least for now. They are all very distinct from one another, the flow from a season to the next is seamless and fluent. The nature dresses herself in new clothes every season, the colors of her coats and skirts changing from white to green to vibrant oranges. The air gets chillier, and I can wear my scarfs again. My favorite season, winter, is on its way, and I can smell it in the wind blowing from Siberia. Rainy afternoons spent inside my apartment, working on new illustrations as the rain is drumming the thick window glass beside me. It's time to light up some candles again. They make me think of mom.

ruska.

Pumpkins aren't really a thing in Finland. Neither is Halloween. Halloween has honestly kind of been forced upon us, its celebration is mainly a capitalist gimmick brought to the Nordics by American cultural colonialism. We had our own traditional holiday that was celebrated around the same time as Halloween, the holiday of the annual harvest, kekri. I think a lot of the younger generation has forgotten about kekri a long time ago. It seems like even Finnish autumn has become something about pumpkins. 

My girlfriend is coming to see me in 10 days. I am so happy we were able to arrange another meeting before Christmas; it's been almost half a year since we last saw each other. I'm excited to share my autumn traditions with theirs, to show them what our fall is like compared to theirs. I can already see us watching the brightly colored falling leaves and me thinking of myself as one of them, falling in love with her all over again.

Happy kekri,

ichigonya