The Calendar Says Fall

It is way too warm outside to be September 26. There should be a chill in the air, not a tropical breeze. It just feels wrong. The calendar says fall, the weather says, “I'm hanging onto summer with every ounce of strength I have.” 

I guess if you live in a southern climate, you're used to these kinds of days this late in September. I'm from Buffalo, NY, so while I appreciate the warm days, I can't quite understand them.

We're closing our pool (when I say we, I usually mean my husband). The water is drained enough, and we're just about ready to put on the winter cover. When it comes time to cover the pool, I usually try to help him. It's much easier as a two-person job.

We're not cutting the grass every week anymore because it's not growing as fast. There are subtle signs of fall whispering about, but summer is fighting to suppress them. The leaves aren't changing color yet, but you can tell it's imminent.

The bounty from the garden isn't coming as furiously as it did just a couple of weeks ago. My daughter's birthday party was on the 13^th, and we sent guests home with bags of tomatoes. We still had too many. We gave them away by the dozen. Now the garden yields a handful a day instead of a basket full. The signs are there.

We do have watermelon desperately trying to ripen before the frost comes. A few are a good size, and some are teeny tiny. There is one that might be edible soon. I'm pretty psyched about it; we've never had watermelon grow before. It's mystifying, too, because our garden was really hit or miss this year. We didn't get one cucumber, every variety of our lettuce died along with our spinach, our beans and peas were less than plentiful, and we only got a few potatoes. The tomatoes and peppers grew like weeds.

The Halloween decorations are up outside, if not the inside yet. Apple cider is in the stores. Football season started, hockey starts in a couple of weeks. Pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. Christmas decorations are in the stores. It's fall, all right.

The spiders are roosting in every crevice they can squeeze into (do spiders roost?), and they are huge. The bees are aggressive like they're ticked off at the world because summer is gone. The blooms on my hydrangea are a muted, brownish pink instead of the vibrant fuchsia it was when I first got it.

It really is fall, only summer won't relinquish its hold quite yet.