Who says Florida doesn't have seasons?  As I travel about Lake County, especially when I approach a large lake like Lake Harris in Leesburg, my spirits are uplifted by splashes of color.  Tupelo, maple and chinese tallow trees.  Sycamores and river birch.  All around me leaves are changing colors. Greens becomes red, orange, yellow and amber brown.  Purple asters bloom along lowlands and here and there yellow daisy-like wildflowers appear together with the more tame cultivated floral varieties that enhance many a front yard.

Isn't Florida wonderful!  Not only do we enjoy an enviable climate with day after day of short-sleeve weather but here sunny skies are the rule not the exception, beautiful rainbows repeatedly follow frequent downpours and the air is continually scented by a succession of blooming plants.  We can grow two crops of vegetables and both tropical and non-tropical fruits prosper in our climate.  That means for breakfast one can conceivably pick both blueberries and papayas from backyard plants.

I grew up in Pennsylvania and then moved to Cape Cod where I lived for seventeen years.  In Pennsylvania autumn meant a trip to Styers, a local apple orchard that specialized in fresh pressed cider, delicious homemade pies and the stickiest, tastiest candy apples I have ever had.  How I adored those candy apples!

On Cape Cod, autumn meant relief from the crowds.  Most tourists had returned to their city homes leaving the beaches for us locals to explore and enjoy again in quiet solitude.  The landscape didn't explode in color like it did in Pennsylvania.  Fall was more subtle and subdued.  The marshland shone golden in the setting sun, and the leaves gradually changed from green to shades of orange.

Here in Florida I love our belated fall.  My first hint of it's arrival begins in October with golden raintrees changing from yellow to coral followed in November by cassias dazzling me with bright yellow blooms.  While grapefruits, red navels and tangerines are beginning to ripen on the trees, I start to notice leaves beginning to turn colors on deciduous trees.  By the end of December when the citrus trees will be covered with sunny globes of fruit, most of the deciduous leaves will have fallen to the ground and bags of leaves in black plastic bags will begin to line driveways.

In Pennsylvania we used to rake leaves into big piles that would be jumped into over and over before we burnt them up in the late afternoon.  On Cape Cod we just left them on the ground, adding a pleasant crunch underfoot as we went to and fro.  Here in Florida, like bandits after gold,  we peruse neighborhoods in the early morn of garbage pick-up days to filch bulging bags of biodegradable gold.  Our bounty, soon to be used as mulch, enriches the soil.

We all have our rituals, our memories and our favorite seasons.  To me autumn has always been and will always be my favorite time of year.  Living in Florida I feel fortunate to enjoy a double dip of autumnal delight.  Once by the calendar and again by the natural flow of our Central Florida climate.  I may not have an orchard here tempting me with lip-staining candy apples but as the leaves are changing in my southern home,  I can go to a nearby farm and pick sweet red strawberries, pluck a tangy kumquat off my very own tree and sip a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice made from fruit picked that day from a neighboring grove.  Now if that isn't the stuff memories are made of, what is!