The days for wearing short pants are numbered.  I felt the first cool breath of autumn this morning.  We threw open the windows of the apartment and turned off the air conditioner which had been humming ceaselessly for weeks. The real air in the apartment smelled good, the floors were naturally cool. The sky was no longer sultry.  I caught a glance of the red Hudson’s Bay blanket on the top shelf of the closet as I removed a fleece to wear.

Capitalizing upon the morning sunshine we went to the Golf Club for breakfast. There is a rush of the patrons to golf as much as possible. The catering staff is already planning its seasonal demise, the frost of change upon their minds.  The cook wonders whether she can do this another year, work seven days a week to choreograph luncheons and dinners; the servers need a job for the winter (but will ensure their reapplication is on record just in case, hopefully it won’t be needed but the cooks knows the strategy so she’s in limbo). There’s always change.

We passively chew upon our breakfast, glancing at the burgeoning River after yesterday’s downpour, contemplating only whether to bring the emergency radio to South Carolina when we leave in November.  We’ll bring the shorts. We know winter’s coming but we don’t care at least not for the usual reasons but we keep it to ourselves.  Younger people have important things on their mind and they don’t include old people with no hair or grey hair and protuberant bellies going south for three months.

This afternoon on my routine and lonely bike ride along the rural fields I hear the cicadas buzzing furiously in the late summer heat.  Do they mate at this time of year? The sun isn’t so high anymore at this hour of the day. The children are back to school.  The roads are quiet.  The open deck at Cedar Cove would have been pleasant today and likely not crowded.  We will have time yet to relish it, the changing leaves on the other side of White Lake, maybe even a fire in the dining room.