Fall Fashion

I've recently started using the expression, ''It's in my bones.'' It's never made sense to me before, and for all I know I'm misusing it now, but it's the only way I can describe the feeling I get whenever I come across a little piece of my own roots here in my adopted home, Turkey. Since I live here, I don't realize how foreign everything around me is until I visit an American friend who serves BLTs and a glass of milk for lunch, or on a visit back to Canada, when everyone shows up at 7:15 for a 7pm dinner invitation. How did we all just know that would be the correct thing to do? It's in our bones.

I was at a mall yesterday for the first time in ages, and was excited by all the fall fashion I saw. And then I remembered it's mid-October, and my friends back home have been wearing their fall clothes since the beginning of September. I am a sweater person, and will come home with three new sweaters when what I desperately needed was a pair of pants. And then I'll realize that two of them are remarkably similar, and the third resembles one I already had. So it goes without saying I felt the effects of a sudden rush of endorphins.

But I don't get to wear sweaters as much as I'd like to in this Mediterranean climate I've adopted. And until I went to the mall yesterday, the annual appearance of ''fall fashion'' was something I'd completely forgotten existed! How could I think of sweaters and wool pants in warm browns, charcoal greys and winterized versions of turquoise, purple and mustard yellow, when the days are still swelteringly hot, with temperatures in the mid-thirties?

But the shops are full of lovely fall clothes, and I couldn't help but wander into Zara and Mango and try on a few sweaters yesterday. Never mind that I was already hot in the air-conditioned mall in just my t-shirt (I'm pregnant, remember?); I hadn't even gotten one arm into the sleeve of the asymetrical cardigan that flattered my current curvaceous state and would be just as nice next year, sans bump, when I started sweating. Which leads me to ask: how can these stores expect to sell anything in our city? I'm sure Istanbulites and people in Ankara and Izmir are enjoying their fall wardrobes, but it'll be a while yet out here. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy as anything these stores are here! I may not be able to buy celery or blueberries, but I can buy a GAP sweatshirt! I just can't wear it in September, October or November, when my 'bones' tell me I should buy it.