As the saying goes, seasons change, and so do I. As of Saturday, we’re officially in FALL, and I’m glad for it. It’s all different now than it used to be for us living in this downtown apartment. I love the weather and walking around downtown and festivals and performances. Sipping coffee in my alley. On Sunday we strolled down to the Lyric to watch a play (PICNIC) and it was very good. Still, it’s all different now than it was.

In our days living off the grid, this was always a joyous time. The rains returned, we would be finishing up the gardens, preparing to plant a fall garden and always prepping to plant a massive number of garlic bulbs. Bringing in and stacking firewood cut the previous season was always a physical chore, and now that the temperatures were dipping a little, we could do more outside work during the day.

Fishing was always a favorite thing in the autumn of the year, and we’d also be fattening up the pigs and maybe a steer for butchering once the first cold snap arrives. That meant gathering the acorns, as much as we could when it was a good acorn year, or cutting hay with my scythe, or gathering cattails from the lower pond. When the children milked cows twice a day, we would be making butter and most of the excess milk and eggs would go to fatten the pigs. Making sauerkraut, wine, or other fermentables was always better when the temperatures were not in the hundreds.

Sitting outside is always more pleasant when the temperatures start to moderate in the autumn of the year, and when you live off-grid that is even more true. In the summer we would disappear into the shade of the trees or down into the root cellar when the heat was incessant, but in the fall, we loved to sit out on the porch and talk. As the days grew shorter, we had more of each night for this kind of fellowship.

All memories are false, and some more than others. We have a tendency to either romanticize or demonize the past – to paint it better or worse – depending on our psychological makeup. We have terms that have come to define the romanticization of periods of the past… Nostalgia, the Halcyon Days, or the Salad Days. When we are of this type of mindset, our memories are often wiped of anything “bad”: bugs and sweat and pain and trauma and discomfort. We remember the good and gloss over the rest, and sometimes that is healthy for us. Some people do the opposite – it is called the “Light Switch Effect,” when people will color the past dark and the mind will be wiped of anything good. This is a usually unhealthy method for coping with trauma or perhaps justifying the “now.” Strangely enough, societies and cultures do this too. During early, growing, optimistic times we culturally have a tendency to romanticize the past and to idolize it.

Later, during times when change-agents desire to move the goalposts and the landmarks, demonize their ancestors, criminalize “archaic thinking,” these change-agents will tell you that everything that happened before now was a lie. This is a form of psychic bolshevism. There was nothing good back then (they say.) It was all bad and all built on crimes against humanity. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

We have more control over our memories than we think, to make them good or to make them bad. Our mind makes filters, like Instagram, but most people want to use memories as a tool to validate the now, which usually involves coloring the past dark. To swim in a false story. Don’t do it. Resist it. If you don’t, future you will blacken your now and there is no end of that darkness. Nostalgia is better than cynicism.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.