Krasnoyarsk residents beat autumn blues

They don’t assign the essay «How I Spend My Autumn» in school — and that’s a shame. Maybe then, from childhood, we’d know tried-and-true remedies for that odd state adults call «autumn blues».

But we all wrote endless précis. Remember those descriptions of golden leaves, rainy walks, and wistful thoughts at the window, perhaps to a song by MakSim? Still, there was one autumn-themed essay at our school. The author of this piece recalls sitting over a notebook at age 12, trying to squeeze out anything coherent. Inspiration came only after dinner, when his mother, back from a 16-hour shift, suggested:

«Let’s write that you spent the whole autumn in Thailand, swimming in the ocean and gathering coconuts! It worked last time, didn’t it.»

You can read how it worked last time in this piece.

For the next two hours our whole family spun a tale about how a poor 12-year-old was bored in tropical paradise, worn out by endless surfing and beach parties. How those palm trees and warm evenings had become insufferable. I remember how the teacher, meeting my grandmother on the street, started asking why we still lived in the Far North and not on an island in the Pacific Ocean. And if at 12 the blues is a stale cookie in your backpack, then at 30 it’s chronic sleep deprivation that bites hardest with the cold’s arrival, when everything around is gray, chilly, and a bit hopeless. We asked Krasnoyarsk residents what to do about it.

— «Autumn blues»? What’s that even supposed to be? — Ibragim asks with genuine surprise, stopped at a traffic light in his car in the city center on a Wednesday afternoon.

— Well, it’s when you’re sad because it’s no longer warm.

— How could I be sad when I have a wonderful wife and insanely good kids? I have a job, everyone’s healthy. What could be better?

Ibragim works in construction. Aleksei, strolling nearby after lunch, is a sales manager at a Moscow company that sells plumbing fixtures, and he answers in kind:

«I don’t fight sadness — I work. I’m always busy. And in the evenings I walk with my wife — we unwind. No worries, no upsets, everything’s great.»

Almost every man we spoke with declared flatly: they have no time to mope — there’s too much work or sport in their lives.

The ladies, however, turned out to be more melancholic.

«Warm cocoa and a blanket. I’m sad, and I don’t want to get sick, so I bundle up and try to get where I’m going faster,» says Diana in a bright yellow hat with a pom-pom and big red earflaps.

A lady at the Mira – Kirov intersection admits sadly:

«I don’t cope at all — I mope. I meet up with my girlfriends, drink coffee. But every season is beautiful in its own way, and autumn is beautiful too.»

Retirees, as usual, keep things lively. One grandmother, asked «What do you do in autumn?», looked thoughtfully at her husband and asked him:

— What do we do?

— We fly to Thailand! — he replied.

We headed over to the mischievous grandmothers, who added:

«We were at a concert yesterday, and we’re going again today. Our friends are performing, and we’re the support group. And we also went to get invitation tickets — we’ll hand them out, because there will be a great concert at the BKZ concert hall on 5 October!»

And here’s what’s interesting: many admitted they love autumn — for the coolness, the sunny days, that «every season is beautiful in its own way». So it seems people in Krasnoyarsk know a simple way to handle the autumn blues: get busy, love what you do, or at least buy some tasty cocoa.

Want to see how Krasnoyarsk residents handle autumn out on the streets? Watch our video — it’s full of stories that will warm your heart right away.