With Labor Day behind us and schools here already in session, it’s starting to feel like fall. The maples on our street began to drop leaves, a few at a time, in mid-August. A week post our vacation, the days are noticeably shorter, with sunset at about quarter past seven.
I find this time of year bittersweet. It’s hard to let go of summer, even as it’s a relief to be out of the 90+ degree Fahrenheit heat wave and soupy humidity of the weeks before our travels. At the same time, with schools in session, everyone back from vacations, and the Jewish New Year right around the corner, fall is always about new beginnings. Even as trees go bare, they are storing sugar for the long winter ahead and forming new buds.
We have one more big family celebration coming up this weekend, and then it’s time to focus, once again, on work and writing and election season, on putting away summer clothes and getting back into layers, on birds migrating south and trees hardening off. I’ve gotten away with only my thumbs in bandages for several months, and I know that is about to change as the temperatures drop and more ulcers appear. So it goes.
To everything there is a season . . .
(Click the link, above, if you can’t see the embedded video of Turn! Turn! Turn! with Judy Collins and Pete Seeger.)
Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.
I too feel the approach of fall. Having been a teacher for my entire working life, the season brings an extra frisson of excitement for new beginnings. Plus, in New England, it brings my favorite weather. Of course, I don’t have as much reason to dread the approaching cold as you do.
Another sign of the season we’ve noticed is the abrupt absence of the hummingbirds that have been daily visitors to our feeder for weeks. I have enjoyed watching them so much! But apparently most of them migrate when the days shorten and blooms fade. How these tiny birds manage to fly to Mexico and beyond is beyond me! I just hope they return in the spring. I hope they remember I put out a nice buffet for them!
Alas, the hummingbirds are winging their way south . . . here’s a fall 2022 migration map https://www.hummingbird-guide.com/hummingbird-fall-migration-map-2022.html