Oh, sure--this past weekend I made my usual joke about carefully wrapping my white bucs in tissue paper and putting away my seersucker suit and straw boater for the year.
Despite not actually having such accoutrements, I still have some misbegotten sense of respect for the Labor Day to Easter sartorial calender that says when it's not safe to wear white shoes and flimsy suits. It's dumb, but you know, silly made-up etiquette rules are what separate us from the animals. Some people say it's tools, but animals occasionally use tool-like devices. You never see them worry about what to wear to a funeral.
Anyway, it's summer in the South for a long time, but it does end eventually. And it never fails that autumn finds a way to sneak in an early appearance to let me know it's headed up the road.
We had an afternoon downpour yesterday--quite welcome I might add, in that it settled the dust and washed away some of the city's tired funk. Rain's always welcome, but there are some summer days when it falls and it's so hot outside that the moisture in the air almost suffocates you. You get a sense of what that crab feels when he's one second into the boiling pot of water and Old Bay.
I walked out to the parking deck last evening as the flood poured down, and as I got near the top of the ramp where the car was parked, I felt it.
A breeze.
A big gust of air blowing through the open sides of the deck, enough to move the litter into little moving windrows. And the breeze was...cool.
Not cold, obviously. But still, not one of those breezes that only feels cool because the air's moving. It was the air of leaves turning colors and wood smoke and the sound of the band playing at the stadium.
It was fall.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at September 8, 2006 01:47 PM