Autumn to me means beginnings and endings at once: the lazy summer cooling to a fresh breeze, and a new school year starting. It's energizing even as it brings in waves of nostalgia over the dead leaves. This year, it says, this year I will really be grown up, will start middle school, high school, college, graduate school. This year I will get things done. Suddenly anything is possible.

Spring is rebellion, restlessness, lemme-out-of-here. It's almost too much for me, too alive to handle. Who the hell put tax season in April?