Better Things to Come

Fall has always been the season that I love most. Day after summer-day I endure the oppressive heat and suffocating humidity, until finally it comes in early October: I wake up and realize that there’s a lightness to the air, and an inexplicable ease of breath. As the day goes on I notice that the pregnant, mountainous clouds that normally usher in the afternoon’s storms have evanesced, and the sky rests - an undisturbed lagoon of cerulean.

One year it’s when I’m strolling up to Publix, my favorite grocery store. Another year it’s when I’m sitting on the patio of The Getaway, our local seafood restaurant. This year it was when I finally got home from another long day at work. Wherever I may find myself, the time comes when the wind tickles and harries the leaves, the collective rustling swelling and ebbing like waves on the beach. I hear it. I pay it no mind - until that first mercifully cool breeze spills across my face.

That’s when I know, beyond what any meteorologist or maple tree may say, that fall has finally arrived. To me, that benevolent wind is a promise - a promise of bonfires and pumpkin patches, of horror movie specials and flannel. A promise of Halloween, and a promise of better things soon to come.

When I first step into that refreshingly brisk evening, the spark of inspiration inside me - no matter how dim or buried - is fanned to life by that wind into a splendid inferno. The first thing I want to do is write. The second is to make apple cider.

For me, there’s no treasured memory or nostalgic aura surrounding apple cider. I know I loved it growing up, but I can’t follow the vine back to any one gathering or person. Instead, the seed was planted during the bitterest of cold days I spent in Tallahassee - and the first time the city had seen snow in almost three decades.

My Southern blood and my wardrobe both were ill-equipped to withstand the onslaught of white, crystalline precipitation. Fortunately (yet sadly), the snow itself was short-lived; ceasing to dwell save for the most shadowed rooftop corners. The cold, however, was insidious.

I’ve always had a fondness for hot tea, and that day I went to get some of my favorite peach-flavored tea bags from Publix. When my casual shopping brought me to the right aisle, my hand paused in mid-flight as I reached for the familiar box. Right above it was an apple-cinnamon tea. I had looked at those boxes time and time again without actually seeing them until that day, and it must have been the perfect atmosphere of the unforgiving cold, the unexpected free time from having classes cancelled, and the elusive spirit of adventure that all culminated into a single thought: I should try to make cider.

The recipe was a simple one that I found online, and one that I’ve come back to like an old lover every year since. The ingredients are as follows:

Apple juice - 8 cups

Cinnamon sticks - 8 whole

Ground cinnamon - 2 teaspoons

Grated nutmeg - 1/8th teaspoon

Cloves - 4 whole

Orange - 1 cut into slices

It all cost under $15, something I appreciated being a broke college kid at the time. I rushed home, peach tea long-forgotten, and followed the recipe:

First, add all of the ingredients to a pot and cook on medium until hot, stirring occasionally.

Next, strain the cider into a pitcher - and that’s it!

The simplicity from start to finish blew my mind, but what came next was much more potent. As I took the first sip, I was transported from the icy clutches of winter back to the painted heart of fall. There was no single sensation or dominant memory, instead I savored the tastes of roasted pumpkin seeds and caramel, I felt the enchanted wind playing about my hair, and I sensed the veil thinning ever so slightly between our world and the one where vampires and witches rule the night.

The illusion quickly dissipated like the tendrils of a dream as you wake up, but the newfound bond between apple cider and all things fall remained. I didn’t make cider again until the next year, when green leaves began their war of attrition - stirred into restlessness by that crisp, charmed breeze. I tasted it then too, and every year after: the promise of fall - of better things to come.