I am remember well many of the falls that I covered my Reston years. The city seems to snap back from summer like summer never even happened. The buzz of traffic goes back to its normal level.
As the temperatures start dropping, holiday fever creeps into everyone's thoughts. Shopping while plentiful in Northern Virginia can be stressful. Just finding the time, a parking space, and someone to wait on you can be a huge challenge. I often found myself sneaking off to LL Bean to do a little early shopping just so I would not get caught in the crowds.
Once you get into the shopping mode, it is hard to unwind or stop. It is not like you can really escape places to shop in Northern Virginia. At one time, your home could be a place safe from shopping, but now with Internet and catalog shopping, even the home has become a place of shopping. And if you happen to turn your television on, you will be reminded of that more than once.
In a rural area like North Carolina's Crystal Coast, escaping shopping is not the problem, finding a place to shop is the challenge If we want a serious department store, we have to drive eighteen miles. Now before you jump the gun and apply Northern Virginia standards to the trip, the eighteen miles takes less than eighteen minutes. Still the trip is not something you make in the evening unless you are serious about buying something.
So here we are on the coast in place with much less of an opportunity to shop. On top of that our weather most fall is very nice. This fall it is exceptional. We have seen great weather even this first week of November. I have a theory that says, the better the outside weather, the less people are interested in shopping. That is especially true if they live in an area where playing in the outdoors is easy and rewarding.
Our area which is near the beaches of Emerald Isle happens to fit that description perfectly. So the question is, "Why would you want to shopping when you could go boating or fishing." The simple answer is that you would not.
Perhaps that is why no one here on the coast seems to be thinking about the holidays. The weather is far too good to be fooling around with shopping. This is still shorts weather. It is so nice outside we have been cleaning and washing down the house in preparation for cooler weather. I still have green tomatoes growing on my tomato plants. Our roses are still blooming. The fish are still biting, and I have not been in a department store in months.
This afternoon as the day was winding down, we climbed in our boat and lowered it in the water for a quiet journey out into the river to watch the sun slip behind the horizon. Had I been in Reston, I might have made a run to Tyson's to visit Bean's. It would have just been another trip to a mall that I would forget as soon as it happened.
Tonight's sunset will not be forgotten so easily. It is a memory that my wife and I will enjoy together. We could only hear a few birds out on the river. It was a wonderful way to end a day. It was certainly the right spot to escape any shopping fever that might try to infect us from up north.
