There’s a period in the summer when summer seems endless. Days are long and fall into a pattern: warm still mornings, increasing heat during the day, then clouds and thunderstorms cooling it off and nourishing the land.
Then there’s the point when autumn is inevitable, even looms close.
The season changed in terms of how the light plays across the landscape a couple of weeks ago. It’s not only that sunset is earlier and earlier. I guess it’s caused by the changing angle of the sunlight, but the way light plays across the trees and meadows is different somehow.
And now we’re in a different weather pattern, one that holds autumn closer than summer. It has been drier. What rain we’ve had recently has been very light, not even enough to register in the gauge. Monday night there was a beautiful lightning storm that came in from the north (not the south, which would be the monsoonal pattern).
Yesterday was cloudy, quite windy, and cool, topping out in the mid-60s. When we got up this morning it was 45° (haven’t seen that low a morning temperature in 2 months or more) and porch tea time required a sweatshirt!
The canyon towhees are again demanding their peanuts when we go onto the porch. They haven’t been interested for a couple of months, but now suddenly they are quite insistent and prompt.
Our second batch of phoebes are not to be seen during the day, but the three of them return to their nest each night still. Somehow, we don’t seem to remember that. I in particular have a genius for needing to do something in the front garden right around dusk, and I flush them from the nest each time! Happily, they wait for me to go back in the house and then they return to their preferred spot.
We’ll have lots of warm weather still. We’ll have hot days and wet days, many of them. But autumn is nearly on us. The small animals know it, the birds know it, and we know it too.