From the Editors

As the Necronomicon of Halloween closes, we're ready to gear up for fall. We grab a fresh glass of apple cider and scour the house for our in-between coats, those not-ready-for-wintertime players that seem to get only a few measly weeks in the rotation. Oh, the leaves! We ask ourselves "why did we forget how much we loved the fall?" We don't have the time to care about how "basic" we might be because it's time to start raking leaves and tweaking our fantasy football lineups. It's time for elections, new TV selections, and some thoughtful self-reflections. It might as well be an early 2000s emo band led by Ace Enders, because baby, it's the Early November. 

And just like that, a snowflake. Shattering our fragile fall diorama with no warning, they're here. They came on Halloween night, a day after the Martians did at Grover's Mill did so many years ago, and just as shocking. 

But just as quickly as they come, they leave. Though they've melted away, their lingering presence remains. Like Silver Surfer heralding the coming of Galactus, they're not here by mistake. 

Longtime contributing artist Bryan Toy illustrates this seasonal anxiety quite perfectly on our most recent cover. Looking skyward, the raker makes a pause for the meteorological equivalent of "Christmas creep."

Thankfully, there is still time to take those fall walks we all crave. To breathe in the slightly chilled air and see the sights before the shroud of daylight savings time's expedited evenings. You can't walk everywhere though, and Liz Allen is eager to change that bit by bit. Taking a look at Erie's Bayfront Parkway, she notes some much-needed updates that could be made, in terms of both branding and building (also always avid for alliterations). She was recently part of a local charrette — "an intensive planning session where citizens, designers and others collaborate on a vision for development" — with Kent State students from the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. Public feedback and government transparency will be immeasurably helpful, lest we not repeat the mistakes we've made before. 

As the cover's raker looks skyward, we also turn our attention to a different early November. This one is coming up in 2020 — the presidential election. Jim Wertz, contributing editor and chairman of the Erie Democratic party has, like many of us, this race on his mind. In conjunction with the Jefferson Educational Society's Global Summit XI, he was able to talk to two leading political minds inhabiting the right and the center of the spectrum, George Will and Michael Smerconish. In addition to making baseball predictions (the Nationals' World Series win being a Will-call), pizza recommendations (Jim heartily endorses Nuova Aurora, much to Smerconish's interest), and most of all, the scramble for the Democratic nomination (both columnists remarkably name-dropping Ohio's Sherrod Brown). 

Enjoy the leaves before they leave, because the future might just hold a 200-inch blizzard this time around.