After what felt like a never-ending summer (I’ve been wearing shorts and flipflops non-stop since I-don’t-even-know-when last spring, but it was easily five months ago since I made the change before my friends’ wedding), fall has finally arrived. It feels odd to see the leaves already making substantial progress give most nights haven’t dropped below the mid-sixties until very recently, but there have been enough cooler days that they maybe got the program. Or maybe they’re trying to provide an example since it feels like the temperature is following the leaves rather than the other way around. I mean, it is actually fall now, on the calendar, so it’s been weird seeing summer stick around as long as it has (with a significant resurgence in the last days of September and first days of October). Normally we’d have had a week or two of cooler days and many cooler nights by this point, but the day I’m writing this is the first time I’ve thought about leaving my windows open all day since it won’t get warm enough to wish I’d turned the AC on at any point in the next few days. Sure, it might wind up warmer inside than I keep the AC at, but I only keep it there so my home is cool at night and so my bedroom is cool enough for me to sleep easily when I go to bed rather than knowing I’ll have to resign myself to a sweaty hour or two before it finishes cooling down since I turned the air on after I got home from work.

I don’t know what this next fall and winter will be like. I hope they’ll be better than my last few, where I struggled to balance my home’s temperature and had to carefully plan when I could put the plastic window coverings up so that I wouldn’t either wind up trapped in an airless bubble of an apartment if we had some unseasonably warm days or wind up putting them on so late that the windows were too cold for the tape to stick well. It would be great if I didn’t need to put those up at all, because this apartment’s heat works properly and none of the windows are so old and drafty that I can feel a breeze even when they’re closed and all my fans are off. I got the sense, frmo the warm summer we’ve had, that the windows here are less drafty, but it’s a lot easier to tell in the winter when a bitterly cold wind blows through your otherwise nice, warm home.

I expect it to be better, honestly, if only because I’ll have the entire floor, with a couple small exceptions, covered by carpets. Plus, this floor is above another apartment that will likely have its own heat running, which will be a significant improved over the horrible floor of my old apartment that was resting on top of the exposed concrete foundations which leach any heat they could get from my apartment into the ground. I’ll also be able to actually use the baseboard heaters that are scattered around this place because they haven’t been circumvented by some crappy “economy” wall units that aren’t adequate for the spaces they’re in. Those horrible little devices couldn’t keep up with the cold leaking in even with the window coverings once the temperature outside dropped into the single digits and the only reason I didn’t freeze the first winter in that apartment (before I used the window coverings) is because I bought a space heater and used the two baseboard heaters that still worked to superheat the rooms they were in so that enough heat would leak into the rest of the apartment that I could stand to be there. There is no way this place could be even nearly as bad as that was. Plus, now I’ve got space heaters ready to go the instant I need them AND I’ve got the dual AC/Heating unit already installed, so I can easily manage the temperature of my apartment! I really hope it doesn’t come to that, though. It would be nice to have winter that doesn’t require constant readjustments to keep my entire home comfortable…

Beyond the temperature and my general heating anxieties, I’m really looking forward to sweatshirt weather, warm drinks, and getting back to making warm, hearty dishes that are difficult to want to eat during the summer. I mean, I love chili, but it’s not really something that I want to have when the temperature outside is warmer than I am. Half the enjoyment of chili is letting the dish’s heat (both temperature-wise and spice-wise) provide some gentle warmth on a cool evening when you’ve been outside perhaps a little bit too long. Which is mostly a nostalgia thing, to be honest, since most of my memories of eating chili in my youth involve returning from trick-or-treating on Halloween and sitting down at my parents’ kitchen table to have a warming bowl of chili before starting the work of counting and sorting my candy. Nowadays, I still enjoy that process, but I’m just as likely to enjoy it with a good stew, a heavy soup, or some kind of dense baked dish (I made a baked mostaccioli the other day that was absolutely perfect for this) alongside a nice warm beverage like a mulled cider or some decaffeinated tea. Plus, I don’t go trick-or-treating anymore, so the sort of “specialness” of it has worn off a bit. Now I indulge in warming food weekly, if not more often, once it starts to get cold. My goal for this year is to come up with more than three things to cycle through each week so I’ve got a bit more variety in my life. I’m sure that, if things calm down enough, I’ll have the spoons to do more than just recreate recipes I know by heart. Maybe I’ll even get into making my own soups for once, rather than relying on the canned variety or on punching up bagged soup mixes. It would certainly be a fun experiment, considering how nonexploratory my usual cooking habits are.