One day it’s muggy and unbearable, and the next…something has changed. The tomatoes are still there, hanging heavy on the vine. And the beets and potatoes…not quite ready to harvest. But the season has decided to shift. The scent of fall is in the air. The winds are just a little wilder. The warm days left will be wistful, seeking to wring every last moment, every last golden ray of sunshine out of it.

The trees haven’t yet turned, well, except for those few errant branches that go early every year. But the sense of it is unmistakeable. Autumn. It seems early this year–but maybe we always say that. “No,” my mother insists, “It is early–the mice are coming in already, and it’s not even September.”

“It’ll be a tough winter,” decrees the guy at the local hardware. “The mountain ash are loaded with berries.”

According to the native lore of the area, the season is turning early. You can tell, they say, by the dropping of the white pine cones, and the low viscosity of the sap.

To me, it seems the garden is in a rush to finish up. The bumper crop of tomatoes, which often extends into September, seems almost ready for the final harvest and it’s not even the end of August yet.

The days are getting shorter; we’ve noticed that suddenly we’re eating dinner at a more reasonable hour. Mid-summer, our days are so long that we sometimes sit down to dinner at nine-thirty or ten.

I check my blog from last year, and we were still finishing end of season chores through to the end of October, and I’m left wondering if this sense of turning is all in my head. I’ve ordered a dozen or so fall-planting trees, and they won’t arrive until the first week of October. Will we be planting in an early chill? It will be fine if that’s the case. But we do love a lingering late season.

Already we’re planning winter. We’ve started consolidating the bees–though I’m sure they have weeks of foraging left–late season stuff from the goldenrod and spotted bee balm. They’ll make us richly colored and strong flavored amber honey from the late blooms. And we’re splitting and stacking firewood. Next week the chimney sweep comes to clean our stove-pipes, before the winter heating season.

It seems, with all the insanity in the air–the pandemic, upcoming elections and the summer’s social unrest–that summer got away from us. But seasons keep their own rhythms, and I think it’s us that lost track of it.

I want to dig in my heels, to slow it down, as though I had any control. But since I love autumn, it’ll be fine whenever it is that we slip into it. And I don’t mind winter, either. But I can hear friends and family, wailing. “No, no, not yet.” These, too, are traditions and we take them all seriously.