by Genevieve Georget

Created on: September 24, 2008

It's the first day of fall today and my favourite time of year. I was sitting outside at lunch and I couldn't help but notice the amazing smell in the air. It's the kind of day where it's summer in the sun and fall in the shade, and there is a golden shimmer cast upon everything in sight. It's stunning.

I'm always relieved when fall comes around. I'm not a person that is very comfortable with summer. I love the warmth and the sunshine but I find the summer to be very unpredictable and it makes me anxious. We are always out of our routine in the summer and something in the air seems to flip the world upside down. Most people seem to desperately long for the reprieve from the cold weather whereas I just consider it a season to be survived. It's as though I hold my breath and just pray that I make it out alive. So far I have.

I've never entered into the month of September as the girl that raves about months spent at the beach or on patios. Instead, I'm the girl eager to wear all my new fall clothes even if it's still thirty degrees out! With the exception of the summer that I got engaged and the summer that I got married, I don't generally remember summers fondly. I'm usually chomping at the bit for it to be over so I can enter into a safer and more familiar time of year. Odd, I know but it wasn't always this way.

Growing up, I used to spend the better part of my summers out a ranch just outside of town. I would spend my days swimming, camping and best of all, riding. My Mother always worked so hard each year to be able to send me and every year, I couldn't wait to be back. It's actually kind of strange because I was never very comfortable in groups. I was very easily intimidated and large groups, especially of girls, made me feel overwhelmed and scared. But I loved the horses and I did love my summers spent with them. I made new friends, got out of the city and gave my Mom some space from the confines of being a single parent.

My favourite memories of the ranch were getting up really early in the morning to round up the horses from the fields. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not a morning person in the least but I could never resist the opportunity to wake up to the early morning air and walk out into the fields that were lightly covered in dew as the horses stood in the distance. Together, we would watch the sun come up. It was so quiet and peaceful at that time of day and although I was young, the staff always let me go out and start bringing in the horses

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