by Seth Rogovoy

I love this weather we are now having. It’s my favorite kind of weather, and my favorite time of year. I love the comfortable days – warm enough to be outside with just a long-sleeved shirt and maybe a sweater, jacket, or hoodie – and the cool-bordering-on-nippy nights – the best possible sleeping weather.

I love the change in the light – the sun is lower in the sky than it was at the height of the summer, casting longer shadows, allowing for richer colors (less of a blast of white washing everything out like bad photo flash).

I love how the air is so much drier than it was this past summer, perhaps the most humid summer of our lives, with dew points that were off the charts for days and weeks on end. Now that’s all been replaced by fresh, clean air and a frequent cool breeze blowing in from the west.

I love all this, but I am left stunned by how quickly the change from summer to fall came this year. Was I not paying attention? What happened to those brief glimpses of incipient autumn we always used to get in August? Did we have none of those this year?

I am left off-balance, off-kilter, by the sudden-verging-on-drastic change of seasons this year.  As much as I love the weather now, I feel like I was given no time to adjust, no advance warning, no gradual, pleasurable ease into my favorite time of year.

One day I was sweating bullets, wondering how I would ever survive another week of hazy, hot and humid weather, and the next thing I knew, the nights were so cold extra blankets had to come out of the closets, sweaters and jackets out from storage in the attic, thoughts turning to snow shovels and heating bills.

My girlfriend assures me it’s always like this, the change is always sudden and drastic, this year is no different. I don’t know why this year, more than any other, the change of season caught me by surprise, threw me for a loop. I don’t gain solace, either, in knowing that it has always been like this; I just never noticed it before, even if that is true.

I wouldn’t trade in the change of seasons, and in absolute terms, I do love and much prefer today’s weather to last month’s. But I don’t love the shock to my system it has caused, veritably knocking me off my feet, pulling the rug out from under me, as if I had missed a month somewhere, a period of transition. As if time had gotten away from me.

Which I suppose it has.