As Fall falls

It's the last day of summer and I can feel the difference. The goldenrod lies exhausted in the meadow, top-heavy plumes worked over by bees and dipping back toward the sod. Lettuce is 2-feet tall and stringy, the only cutlery it will see is when I fork it into the soil to rot for next year. The wind comes in big spooky gusts that rock the house and send the first fallen leaves skittering across the road like the dry, discarded jackets of last spring's cicadas. The night-time has grown more insistent, slowly silencing the grasshoppers and treefrogs as it leaks and leaks more into each passing day. And the apples are here. The grandmother tree by the barn drops hers any old time into the muddy track, among the overgrown weeds, or behind the detached snow-plow. It's still summer, today. But the change is here, and the exhalation that started midsummer's day is getting stronger now, blowing straight through the open windows in our living room, taking with it all the too-hot days of July and August, and bringing the inward-looking pumpkin-times ahead.

What it all comes down to is: time to start up Netflix again.