Basic Bitches, Collective Delusion, and The Long American History of Being Defensive About Pumpkins

Image by cwizner from Pixabay

This year Starbucks released the pumpkin spice latte on August 27, the earliest date yet and before Labor Day, another contender for the official marker of fall in America. It’s not cold anywhere on August 27 and no leaves are yet changing, but by some definitions, it was fall.

What is fall? The most common answer is that fall is when the weather changes from summer hot to winter cold — though this has never been true in large parts of this country and others, though it’s often not true even in the places you expect it to be, though it will likely prove even less true as climate change alters seasons around the world. (In Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, the unnaturally idyllic English village of Lower Tadfield always has the exact “right” weather for every season, sunshine every summer day and snow on Christmas, but then it’s also the home of the Antichrist.)

Fall in Los Angeles is not a fact of nature but a set of social gestures, a collective wish. I do my part by changing into a wardrobe of fall clothes that are no warmer than their summer counterparts but are in autumnal colors and textures: suede joggers, a wine-colored tank, a cropped, open-knit, sleeveless “sweater” only by the most generous definition of that word.

Of course there are seasons in Southern California, but they do not follow the patterns ascribed in American popular culture, patterns based loosely on New England but with the edges rounded off.

Growing up in Los Angeles, the lack of “real” seasons was extremely distressing to me. As a child I felt everywhere a pervasive sense of unreality and I didn’t know to look for it anywhere but outside myself. Every Halloween my family would visit a parking lot pumpkin patch that had never grown a thing, and though I loved Halloween (of course) I was nagged by the idea that it was all fake, a type of performance that stood in contrast to the genuine, unselfconscious traditions I imagined people enjoyed in other places. This rankled because I already felt my entire life was a sort of failed performance, an approximation of what real people did, and I didn’t need to be reminded of that when I was just trying to buy some pumpkins.