For every season there is a memory

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

For Every Season There Is A Memory – October 2025

It’s inevitably this time of year when I think back to my childhood. I can vividly remember summer winding down and shopping for school supplies with my parents. The air was just a little bit crisp and we needed a light jacket. For those of us who actually liked school, it was an exhilarating time.

Sure, we missed the lazy freedom of August afternoons and evenings, but a new school year meant new promises, new learnings, and the chance to reconnect with friends and move our lives forward.

What stands out most in those memories were the in-between weather days – that gentle hand-off between summer and fall (or, at another time of year, winter and spring.) The days when the air was cool but not cold, crisp but not biting. You could wear a sweatshirt in the morning and short sleeves by lunch. There were colors and smells and small, perfect transitions that felt like the world exhaling.

I miss those transitions. I genuinely do.

As I write this, it’s October 9. Yesterday, I was running the air conditioners full blast in my house as the outside air was muggy and close to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Today, I’ll be switching to heat because it’s supposed to dip into the 20s overnight. Eighty to twenty degrees! I can’t remember another time when we went from full-blast cooling to full-blast heating in a single day. (It’s the equivalent of all the trees being lush and green one day, and absolutely all the leaves on the ground and brown the next.) It used to be that September and early October were “window weather” – those glorious weeks when you could open up the house, air everything out, and let nature do the climate control. Now that window has disappeared, literally and figuratively.

So what happened to the middle seasons? Are we all just imagining them? Is this the meteorological equivalent of Mandela Effect nostalgia – or the latest exhibit in the museum of climate change?

It feels like autumn has turned into a rumor – something we remember, but rarely experience. Spring, too, seems to have been demoted to a long weekend between snow and pollen. The middle has vanished, replaced by extremes: furnace or freezer, drought or deluge. The weather app used to help plan your wardrobe; now it’s more like an anxiety forecast. Just one more sad thing in our lives that has become completely polarized.

But maybe it isn’t just the weather that’s changed – maybe it’s us. Our sense of scale shifts with time. When I was a kid, I remember Charms lollipops being enormous – practically the size of my palm. The last time I saw one, it looked tiny, barely a half-hearted circle on a stick. Did the candy shrink, or did my hands just grow? Maybe it was both. Maybe that’s one of the earliest examples of “shrinkflation,” where things really do get smaller, but our memories make them seem even bigger.

It’s funny how uncertain memory can be. Ask any group of friends to describe a childhood moment – a favorite park, the layout of a classroom, the color of the school bus seats – and you’ll get five different answers, all delivered with absolute confidence. Memory isn’t a video recording; it’s a story we tell ourselves, edited and remixed with each retelling. Yet despite that, some memories feel anchored, immune to revision. I can still smell the freshly sharpened pencils, the faintly rubber scent of new sneakers, the musty air of the first fall rain. You can’t convince me those things didn’t happen exactly as I recall them.

So perhaps not all our memories are suspect. Maybe the things that mattered most – the moments that marked beginnings and endings – remain truer than we think. Maybe the middle seasons themselves were part of what gave those memories texture. The smell of the crisp air wasn’t just a sensory detail; it was the scent of change, the proof that time was moving but hadn’t yet sprinted ahead. Today, it feels like time doesn’t move – it lunges.

We live in an age that prizes acceleration. Faster shipping, faster connections, faster news cycles. Maybe the vanishing of the in-between seasons is nature’s way of keeping pace with us. We rush through life, so the planet rushes through its transitions too. It’s as if the Earth looked around and said, “Oh, we’re doing everything in one click now? Fine, I’ll skip autumn.”

Still, I hold on to the conviction that not everything has changed. There are mornings – brief, precious and rare ones – when I catch that perfect balance in the air: a soft sun, a faint breeze, the distant smell of wood smoke. (Of course, they sadly happen in late October and not early September.) For a fleeting moment, the world feels like it used to. Those are the mornings when memory and reality overlap, when the mind stops questioning what’s real or exaggerated and just believes again.

I suppose that’s what fall really is – belief wrapped in nostalgia. We rake leaves that will never all be gathered, we sip pumpkin lattes that never quite taste like pumpkin, and we swear that once upon a time, the weather knew how to take its time.

Maybe my Charms lollipops were smaller, maybe my hands were bigger, or maybe the truth sits somewhere in between – like the seasons used to. But if memory, weather, and candy can all play tricks on us, one thing remains certain: the feeling of change is still real. Whether it arrives on the wind or through the thermostat, it reminds us that time keeps moving, even when we don’t notice.

And so every October, I find myself once again looking out the window, wondering where the middle went. Maybe it’s hiding in a box of old photos, or at the bottom of a candy jar, within the mourning of our moderate politicians, or between the pages of a school notebook that still smells faintly of pencil shavings. Wherever it is, I hope it’s warm enough to sit for a while – and cool enough to remember what it felt like.

Last week’s blog, where I discussed some brief lowlights of the properties I experienced in San Diego, has a happy coda. The team at Hilton fully agreed with me that the Homewood I stayed at was not up to snuff, and they’ve made it up to me. It’s always refreshing to know that travel and hospitality firms will occasionally do the right thing by its customers. While the whole industry has only a shadow of the customer service it once had, Hilton is still one of the better ones at hearing the issues of its customers.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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