T.S Eliot wrote ”April is the cruellest month” (yes, we were once forced to read books before we discovered magazines), but he was from Missouri—so what did he know?  We all know that here in Tampa, April is pure paradise.  April is when we get all smug and full of ourselves for living in the Best City on Earth.  It’s when we sit, poolside, and call our relatives in Connecticut to tut-tut and offer our sympathy over that unexpected spring snowstorm or whatever it was that made everyone standing outside the Today Show studios in New York City look so miserable. 
But come the official first day of fall, which is today, the enthusiasm begins to fade just a little.  Even though it’s absolutely gorgeous here right now, (and we certainly won’t tempt fate by commenting on how quiet the weather has been—and everyone reading this must immediately knock on some solid substance resembling wood to keep the storms away) we start to develop a serious case of Fall Envy.  For this, we blame the mainstream media. 
While the rest of the country is all Back To School and plaid and crispy-weathered, here in Tampa we’re still in our Tropical Depression Mode, wincing as we turn on the news each morning in anticipation of John Winter pointing to the dreaded buzz-saw hurricane icon lurking out in the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, chunky tweeds, soft cashmeres, and buttery leather boots dominate the national television and magazine ads, not to mention the catalogs that clog our mailboxes.  We swat mosquitoes, listen to the frenzied tree-fog concert, and double our flea meds for the dogs while Martha Stewart starts in with those annoyingly tasteful pumpkin-and-autumn-leaf crafts (okay, when was the last time anyone in Florida grew a pumpkin?), and those of us from the northern states get all nostalgic for the smell of burning leaves and decent apples.
The only thing we’re forgetting in all this is what a tawdry trade-off a few perfect fall days are for having to put up with the rest of the nastiness. Sure, New England has its moments—brilliant leaves in the autumn and flowering dogwoods in the spring—but, in between? Gray slush, bone-chilling cold, lots of rain, no sun for days, bare branches, and brown everywhere (once the gray snow melts).  And half the time, the indoors are so over-heated that you have to peel off all those woolen layers anyway as soon as you step inside. 
But even though most of the country is, like us, climate controlled, the fall designers can’t help but hark back to a time when we had to bundle up against the elements.  So they make these fat sweaters and high boots and we want them, because, no matter how acclimated to Florida we’ve become, deep within our DNA there’s still some residue of that Mad Max Bundle Up mentality.  Thus the whole Fall Envy Fallacy.  Well, we say, it’s time to stop the madness and get over it.
We live in a semi-tropical climate. We do not grow gourds here.  (We need our own version of fall harvest—in fact, we think it’s time to take “Guavaween” to the next level).  We don’t need to dress like Vikings, and we have talented designers right here in Tampa to prove it.
There was a time when some of us would put away our Florida pastels each September and dress in more “seasonal” olives and browns until the holidays.  But lately, we’re tired of paying tribute to a harvest season that happens hundreds of miles away.  We’re going tropical this fall.  Does anyone know where we can find some guava-green pumps?