Fond memories of my favorite seasons spring to mind | Whale’s Tales

Published 11:30 am Friday, March 27, 2026

My favorite two seasons are spring and fall, each inextricably tied to happy memories.

Not that summer and winter are slouch seasons, if seasons can be said to slouch.

So for what it’s worth, here’s why I put these two seasons at my personal top. I’ll start with spring.

I begin it with my annual rereading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” particularly the opening lines of the Prologue that bathe one in the vernal (green) spirit that soothes and refreshes. Chaucer wrote his work when the sort of English we may recognize bits of here and there was just shaking off the shackles of Norman French, and it genuinely feels like springtime.

In the warming days of spring, Ann and I love to go out for rambles about the town and listen to the croakers and the crickets. Personally, I love to visit the Seattle Arboretum when the flowers are in blossom, and the ground is dry enough so as not to require waders.

There is one moment that will forever epitomize spring for me, one that seemed to slow time to a crawl, in the best possible sense. One afternoon when the Reporter newspapers’ offices were still in Kent, I pushed into the mid-afternoon and into the row of cherry blossom trees framing the south parking lot. At that moment, lightly moved by a soft breeze, the trees rained petals on my head, and flushed the air with their fragrance.

Doesn’t look like springtime outside with all the rain, but it’s there.

Now onto autumn.

When I was a kid, the advent of autumn brought in the heady odor of burning leaves throughout the neighborhood, and the return of games of neighborhood football out on the then-playground of North Auburn Elementary School — now called Dick Scobee Elementary.

It also meant the annual rolling out of the Puyallup Fair, happily coinciding with the launch of the new school year. By the time I had contrived to reach seventh grade, the fair was advertised with its own television commercial, replete with an accompanying ditty that gave us oinking pigs, moving cows, neighing horses, and guys running around dressed up like Junior Samples from “Hee Haw.” The catchy tune went went like this:

“You can do it at a trot, you can do it at a gallop,

You can do it real slow so your heart won’t palpitate

Just don’t be late. Do the Puyallup.”

Do those commercials still run? If they do, I’m sure they’ve changed. I haven’t watched local television news in years, so I don’t know.

As the season advances, there is Halloween. In that era, you went out with your buddies without the parental units to keep an eye on things.

One odd thing — Halloween started in me the lifelong habit of comparing differences between porches at night and in the day, each taking on a different character. And Thanksgiving Day follows hard on the heels of Halloween.

Percy Bysshe Shelly begins his autumn “Ode to the West Wind,” as follows:

“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, black, pale and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes …”

And ends it with:

“Oh wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

So let the good times roll.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.