It’s the only season with two names (that we can use in print). Fall, as we most commonly call it in North America, officially arrived a couple of weeks ago, and the Prince George weather caught up to it about a week ago. It’s been grey and miserable for a few days now, with the occasional shower and the need to scrape the windows on the car some mornings. We call it fall, but the English apparently still use the term autumn to refer to the season which starts in mid-September. As with a frustrating number of words in the English language, no one seems to know exactly what the root word in Latin (or possibly even before that means). Some experts have suggested the original word meant |drying up”, but that it just conjecture. The meaning of fall is much more straightforward, as anyone with a lawn and a couple of trees can testify. When you’re out there for the third straight weekend raking up leaves, it seems impossible they all came from those two or three trees in your yard. The fact is, they don’t. Some of them are smuggled in by squirrels and chipmunks, apparently as their way of paying us back for all the food we left them over the past winter (you know, the seeds in the bird feeder). Some of them come from the trees in the yards of your neighbours. Some come from trees in Russia, borne to Prince George by winds which were uncommon a few years ago, and are probably another side effect of global warming. (Everything else that happens with the weather gets blamed on global warming, so why not the increased number of leaves in your yard?) So you rake them, and the wind starts to blow a little stronger, and a few drops of rain appear, but you’re almost finished and this weather is going to blow over right away, so there’s no reason to put on a hat or a heavier jacket. . . . And then you wake up the next morning with a sore throat and a cough and a stuffed-up nose, and you know that’s another sign that fall is here. Fall can be a beautiful time of year, with the leaves changing colours, but so much of it just feels miserable as well. A light rain in spring serves as a reminder that summer is on the way, and the world will soon be coming forth in blossom again. A light rain in fall just means those leaves on the ground are going to weigh about six tonnes by the time you get them collected, which means you can add a sore back to the cold you picked up raking them. You know, in some respects fall makes me look forward to the next season (which shall not be named yet), although I can do without the stores already having some of their Christmas stuff out already.