The best part about Paris in the summer is the fact that the sun doesn’t set until at least 10pm. The last couple of weeks, it’s been getting dark by 9 which can only mean one thing – doom. No, but seriously, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Fall and it’s sneaky arrival. Objectively, it’s beautiful. Great temperature, sunny skies, and the colorful transformation of the trees. But I will always be haunted by what it symbolizes: winter’s approach. Despite how much I used to love getting a new backpack and school supplies each September, I still felt an annoying sense of dread for the cold, bitter, depressing season around the corner. Thinking about it now, though, I feel worse in the winter in Paris than in the suburbs growing up. There’s something unnerving about Paris when it’s slushy, messy, cold, gray, and windy. I feel suffocated, small, emprisoned, blue and hungry. The ther good thing about summer is that when it’s super humid and hot, I’m usually not hungry for anything heavy, thus the season healthy eating habits! 

Anyway, this year September also brings us one step closer to….October, the month where we will all simultaneously be afflicted with swine flu and stop being productive. I can’t speak for the US, but the inevitability and impending swine flu pandemic is all French media can talk about, besides the economy, Ted Kennedy’s death, and undoubtedly some protest going on somewhere in France. Now is as good a time as any to start eating right, getting rid of the processed, industrialized foods in the hopes of creating a mega-efficient immune system that will beat the flu. Yet I can see this flu scenario creating chaos in the city – transportion, down. Businesses, closed. People, complaining more than usual. Masks, the latest fashion out of Paris.

But there is one good thing about Fall, so as long as not EVERYTHING shuts down: Pumpkin. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin spice, pumpkin Kashi crunchy granola. A friend of mine recently brought me back Kashi’s TLC Pumpkin Spice Flax crunch granola bars and they’re to die for. It makes me feel like I’m eating pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. It doesn’t taste artificial (because it’s not) and it makes me feel SUPER American! Can’t beat that, right? 

So here’s hoping we’ll all be alive and well this Fall to partake in the festivies: mourning summer, and celebrating the cooler season’s delicacies!