Growing up I don't recall the fall being a great time. Thanksgiving is a weird time when you have to explain to people who you've known your entire life why yes, you still don't eat turkey or other meat, because you never have. And just in general, the holidays are a hard time when you're growing up around so many people with different lives as you. I didn't come from hardly much money so there was always little Rubi in the corner that loved her family & life but didn't understand why it looked so different from the people she was friends with at school. Of course when we grow up, we learn our circumstances and realize how unimportant most of that fluff is. Now, I enjoy the time I get to see my family once or twice a year more than I ever thought I would with just us conversing at the table and remembering what moments like that are. I digress. One of the highlights of fall growing up however was football. I always loved watching football with my family and seeing how much they loved the Dallas Cowboys became an engrain piece of me so much that I've already written a post about that. It would become an integral part of who I am and I didn't realize that.

   When I came to college, I was urgent to find a place for myself because all I could think about was the importance everyone placed on how you will fail if you don't find your place. I found Talons, which I've mentioned many times in other posts but if you're new: it's a spirit organization at UNT where we would congregate at sporting events, participate in community service events, blast off an age old cannon at football games, and most memorably build North Texas' homecoming bonfire each year. It was a 7 day project completely built by us students in the organization & burned down exclusively by 23 of the orgs members who spent the most hours on it and from the moment the first pallet is dropped on the ground, someone has to be monitoring the site 24/7. No rain, mud, or cold weather can make you deviate from those rules.

   Talons would also soon become an important part of who I was and who I am. Talons giving me that bonfire gave me a lot more in life that would soon change the way I looked at fall. For 2 out of the 3 years we had a bonfire during my college years, I would spend Halloween on a bonfire site instead of living up my best sins during a night out like a college person SHOULD be doing, but again I digress. It gave me my best friends. It gave me some experiences that I know honestly will never be duplicated in another form. There aren't words that properly convey the stress of bonfire week and the blood, sweat, tears, and friendships that will be sacrificed in the heat of it all. Just the other day, I reminscinced with Stacy about the time we were moving pallets in the mud while being yelled at like we were minions under a tyrant. I met my best friends during this experience under layers of socks and hoodies to keep me the bare minimum of warm in freezing weather at night watch and bonded with them over shitty mcdonalds meals that felt like fine cuisine on our food breaks. The night we would burn it down was full of manic euphoria from a job well done mixed with an intense feeling of nostalgia of what we just went through so soon. Mixed with sleep depravity, it's a odd form of magic.
   I also was given a new meaning to football with Talons. It became less about the game and the community I felt with the people around me and made me realize that's why I had loved it all along. The rooting for the underdog atmosphere we had the entirety of my college career was what I lived for because there is beauty in winning when no one is believing you can which turned out to be an unsung theme among Talons members. It's something I think about every fall now as football winds up and although my first bonfire was six years ago, it still is something I love to think about but would NEVER want to experience all the way through again. And the best part of getting old is moments like next weekend, where I get to watch a bonfire burn down as alumni with the same people I built one with before but this time we are all clean, warm, and free from any of the work that went into it.