It's the very last Saturday in September and everything is starting to crisp up. 

It's always a little sad for me. 

Truthful thoughts cross my mind: I hate to see the beaches empty. I'm so resistant to this time of year. But coffee does taste better when I'm a little chilled and introspective. 

The revelry of fall is that it's a let down. Not like a bummer, but a letting down of so much splashing energy and neon colored sunsets and sweaty, sticky late summer nights. 

It's an exchange of one type of celebration for another. 

But like I said, the coffee is better in the fall and that's a pretty big present to me. It almost makes up for the fact that I have to wear pants. 

I am a non-pants person. And I think legs were made to be free which is the exact opposite credo that fall and winter hold. It's all kind of comical to think about; most winter mornings I'm agitated by the goosebumps, by my very own leg hair that I shaved the night before. It has grown to the point of irritation -like when I tug my jeans over them, the hair bends and hurts somehow? 

But the point of this little essay is to admire the very last Saturday in September. For what it is. For the warmth radiating outside my window, for the Monarch butterflies still fluttering around. A few solitary leaves drop like the ticking second hand of a clock. They keep the time quietly. 

The leaves, the seconds tick by here and there and before you realize I the hour is up. 

This is how fall/winter approaches me every year. I can never remember when or how all the leaves ended up on the ground and how I didn't notice it until the trees were completely bare. 

It's a costume change the audience only notices once a complete character reappears totally different. We don't see behind that curtain, but that's kind of awe-inspiring and wondrous in itself. 

How, when we live in the world, we see so much but at the same time, miss it all. 

What a mystery.