Ode to Autumn....
Good grief, have I been remiss in my Official Capacity as Big Girl Blogger Par Excellence! The hangover from my 45th birthday lasted well into September, and wasn't helped by a huge dose of back-to-school anxiety with my first-grader. Now baseball's just about over, Fall fell, and WHAM! it's time to carve that pumpkin.
Well, gentle reader, if you're hangin' with me after all my weeks of blogger negligence, POOF, you have my permission to eat an entire bag of Hershey caramel kisses right now.
Don't you love Autumn? I mean, it's a veritable Big Girl Food Fest. All the beautiful apples...apple cider, candied apples, caramel apples, apple pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, chewy little pumpkin candies, candy corn...and let's not forget the many varieties of our favorite chocolate candies which are made in miniature under the auspices of being "just the right size" for all those trick-or-treaters....give me a break, they're really made bite-size so all us Chocoholics can indulge at our desks all day long, then trek off to the local ER in the midst of our diabetic coma!
But there's something about Autumn that is, as an old friend of mine used to say, "happy-sad." The crisp, cool air is electric with anticipation of costumes, toilet paper streamers in trees, and tummyaches from too much chocolate. We get excited with preparations for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but in the back of our minds, we mourn the loss of summer, the loss of sandals, and cold beer and the smell of chlorine, the long sunny days. Our tan lines fade, our skin gets progressively itchy, our favorite football team misses the playoffs, and there you go, it's winter and we are extremely cranky.
By now you know me, Bunkie Big Girl, and how I measure the success of anything...by food. And Autumn does rate very high on the Big Girl Food Meter...just thinking about holiday treats and feasts sends me into something very close to shock. So personally, during Autumn, when I contemplate the beauty of the brilliant leaves that fall to the earth, I can easily shake my doldrums by picturing how Tom Turkey will look on my table in about a month.
Here's a Bunkie Big Girl Autumn Challenge: for once, let's observe this season without any references whatsoever to food. See if you can do it...take a walk around the yard, and notice the leaves on the trees...don't the orange ones remind you of candy corn? OOPS. Ok, let's have a gander at those corn stalks in the farmer's field, an age-old harbinger of harvest...mmmm, corn pudding...oh, sorry, I guess it's impossible for me to separate Fall from Food.
Well, here's to Autumn, falling leaves, and to spending the next few months indoors catching up on bad TV. And when you dash off to the store for new batteries for that remote control, make sure you grab some candy corn. You'll thank me for it.
Ok,
