The Things I Miss About Fall in the U.S.

Autumn in Transylvania is breathtaking. Golden forests spread across the Carpathians, mist curls through the mountains and settles around medieval towers, and the markets fill with apples, walnuts, mushrooms, and the abundance of the season. It is the kind of beauty I dreamed about before moving here, and there are moments when it still catches me completely by surprise. Yet, as the air cools and the leaves begin to fall, I find myself aching for another kind of autumn—the one I left behind in New Castle, Pennsylvania.

The Autumn I Knew

Some of what I miss is wonderfully silly. By now, the grocery stores back home would have surrendered completely to pumpkin spice: coffee creamers, candles, muffins, cereals, and an increasingly ridiculous collection of things that probably had no business being pumpkin flavored. I know how commercial it all was, but I loved it anyway. There was something joyful about the way the whole world seemed to announce the arrival of fall at once. Here, the markets are filled with a more authentic kind of seasonal abundance, and I have come to love the apples, walnuts, plums, and other things that appear because this is genuinely their time of year. Still, I would happily take a pumpkin spice latte and an aisle full of unnecessarily autumn-scented things.

I miss the coziness of my old Sears Verona home even more. Autumn suited that house. I would put something in the crockpot while candles flickered on the table and an ambient fireplace or fall forest played on the television. There was a throw blanket waiting in the sunroom, where I could study and watch the leaves come down outside the windows. The neighborhood changed with the season as the maples and oaks turned crimson and gold, briefly transforming the street into a tunnel of color. I even miss the enormous oak tree that dropped a seemingly impossible quantity of leaves into the yard. At the time, I mostly remember raking until my hands blistered; now I remember the smell of the leaves, smoke from the firepit, and the satisfaction of coming back inside after working in the cold. None of it was extraordinary, but together those small rituals marked the passage of the year and made home feel like home.

Transylvania’s forests are larger and wilder, but I have learned that beauty isn’t interchangeable. A mountain covered in gold doesn’t replace the tree that stood outside your own window, because what we love about a place is inseparable from the life we lived there.

A Season We Shared

What I find myself missing most, however, is how much we did with autumn. There were farmers’ markets turning into pumpkin patches, football games and bonfires, spooky movies, Halloween events, and houses gradually filling with jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, witches, and skeletons. I miss pulling out all of my witchy things and allowing the house to become a little darker and stranger for a while. I especially miss Witches’ Night Out in Volant, when the town filled with people who were all willing to play along with the season. There was a shared language to American fall, a collective agreement that the changing of the year was worth noticing and celebrating.

It is somewhat ironic to discover how much I miss American Halloween after moving to Transylvania, a place the rest of the world has spent more than a century associating with vampires, castles, and things that lurk in the dark. The folklore here is older, stranger, and far more interesting to me than the commercial mythology attached to Dracula, but it is also very different from the exuberant Halloween culture I knew in the United States. Sometimes I miss the children in costumes, ridiculous haunted yards, enormous candy aisles, spooky movies playing all month, and jack-o’-lanterns glowing on porches. The shadows may feel deeper here, but sometimes I still want the plastic skeletons.

Beneath all of that playfulness was something much more meaningful to me. Autumn was also the season when I hosted Samhain and invited people into my home to recognize death not as a spectacle, but as a passage. We gathered around food and warmth while the natural world outside was dying back, making room to remember people we had loved who had already passed through that door. People could bring photographs, tell stories, speak names, grieve, laugh, and celebrate lives that had mattered to them. In a culture that often seems uncomfortable allowing death into ordinary conversation, I wanted to create a place where we could sit with it for an evening without trying to make it less inevitable or less profound.

The season itself made that acknowledgment feel natural. Leaves fell, gardens died, the days shortened, and the living world visibly withdrew toward winter. Samhain gave us an opportunity to recognize ourselves within that same cycle and contemplate the door every one of us will eventually walk through. I never found that morbid; I found it grounding. Remembering that life ends reminds us to pay attention while we are here, while remembering our dead allows them to remain part of the stories we continue to carry. I miss holding that space for people, and I miss the way the silly, spooky, cozy, and solemn parts of autumn could exist together without contradicting one another.

Carrying Home With Us

Living abroad has changed the way I understand homesickness. I used to think of it rather literally, as wanting to go home, but that isn’t quite what I experience now. I don’t want to exchange this autumn for the one I left behind. I love watching mist move through the Carpathians and seeing the forests change. I love the markets and woodsmoke, the villages settling into colder weather, and the traditions I am still discovering. Romania is becoming part of the seasonal rhythm of my life, and I suspect there are things happening around me now that I would miss terribly if I ever left.

Homesickness, for me, is increasingly about accepting that loving a new home does not erase the life that came before it. I miss my house and my trees, pumpkin spice and spooky movies, Witches’ Night Out and the ridiculous excess of American Halloween. More than anything, I miss the rituals I created with other people and the feeling that we were marking the passage of the year together. Those things mattered because they belonged to a life I built, and creating a new life doesn’t require me to diminish what was beautiful about the old one.

Perhaps some of those traditions will find their way here eventually, although I don’t want to recreate Pennsylvania in Transylvania. I want to make room for the things I carry while continuing to learn from the place where I live now—to celebrate what is already here, create new traditions, and allow the old ones to change as my understanding of home changes with them. I may someday find myself around another Samhain table, remembering the dead while the Carpathians outside settle into winter, surrounded by people who have become part of a life I couldn’t have imagined when I sat watching leaves fall from my sunroom in Pennsylvania.

Maybe that is one of the stranger lessons of starting over somewhere new. We don’t always leave one home behind and replace it with another. Sometimes we carry pieces of each with us, until home becomes large enough to hold places, people, traditions, and versions of ourselves that could never exist in only one place.