Autumn.

I love autumn. It is far and above my favorite season. It is a bittersweet love since I suffer from allergies annually, but it is a small price to pay for the best weather of the year. Autumn comes with harbingers for each of the senses. It is a sometimes gradual sometimes overnight transition. It is the dying of the earth and its death knell is beautiful.

One day, halfway through September I leave the house and air smells different. It is no longer the hot, green smell of growing grass and steaming leaves. Some if it is the harvest. Farmers gather in their crops and the disturbed soil and chaff flavor the air, cluing in my nose that autumn has arrived, even if the mercury in the thermometer hasn't been told yet.
I go about my business of the day and as I drive down the highway I am annoyed by the glare of the sun. It gleams from a low place in the sky, bright, but not so hot as a few weeks ago. The very quality of light has changed. The sun seems tired all of a sudden, tired and far away. Everything begins to look like fall.
Cicadas sing and frogs, a constant buzzing you can hear even in the towns. One day hot, another cold. A few days of rain and the temperature dips in the fifties. It won't go higher than eighty after that. Why? Because the weatherman says? No. I can feel it. There's a finality to it all. Summer is passing away.The winter king cometh and he sends his chilly heralds before him.


We know in the deepest part of us that all things die. But we have the certainty that next spring all things will live again. For now, we can enjoy the familiar smells, the long-awaited holidays the goodness of this season. We have a promise that the seasons will continue, each in their own time until the earth itself is no more. There's a peace in this. Maybe the autumn is practice, year after year, for our own death one day. We can have that peace, knowing there will be a new spring after our physical winter, too. Maybe not.

Whatever it means to you, it is upon you, without guile or subtlety. Brilliant scarlet and gold leaves will  greet us one morning and frost some morning after that. The autumn has arrived.