Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

Autumn (or "Fall" if you're American and prefer your equinoxes to be monosyllabic) always takes me by surprise.

This morning walking to work, it was Autumn. Last week it was Summer. The sun was shining just as much as last week, it was just as warm, the trees were only imperceptably less green, but there was a quality to the light, a nuance to the air. It felt like Autumn.

The weird thing is, it's hard to pin down why. I couldn't point to any one thing that made it feel like autumn. Perhaps little things like the length of the shadows and the smell of the leaves were being registered subconsciously by my primitive caveman brain, telling it that it's time to stop sunbathing on the hot rocks and go check to see how many nuts the cave-women has stockpiled.

The other weird thing is that every year I forget what Autumn feels like. Which is kind of nice. Every year it's a pleasant surprise to be reminded of it. Pleasant, that is, until Autumn delivers it's payload of crappy weather and long cold nights.

But that's still to come. At the moment I welcome Autumn back like an old friend. And old friend who'd I'd forgotten how nice it is to be with.