I don't need a calendar to tell me fall is coming.
Here in Maine, you can feel it before summer is actually over. The afternoons can still be warm, but the mornings and evenings have started getting cooler. A few leaves have already decided they're done waiting and begun to change, and every night seems to arrive just a little earlier than the one before.
Around here, school has started again in most towns, which always seems to make fall feel official even when the calendar says we still have a few weeks of summer left.
There are other signs, too. Those strange white webs have started appearing in the trees—some low enough to get a good look at and others stretched across branches much higher up. I recently learned they're made by fall webworms, and while they're a little creepy, there's something almost beautiful about the way the silk catches the light.
None of this means summer is over. Not yet. There are still warm days ahead, gardens are still growing, and there will probably be at least a few afternoons when fall feels very far away.
But something is changing.
I think that's one of the things I love about this time of year. Seasons don't simply end one day and begin the next. They overlap for a while. Summer holds on during the afternoon while fall slips into the early morning. Green leaves fill the trees while a few reds and yellows begin appearing around the edges. You leave the house without a jacket and wish you'd brought one by the time the sun goes down.
Sometimes even the air feels different.
We tend to think of fall in terms of the things that come with it—pumpkins, apples, colorful leaves, sweaters, Halloween, and eventually the first frost. But there's something special about the part that comes before all of that, when the changes are small enough that you have to notice them.
One cooler morning. One red leaf among hundreds of green ones. A little less daylight at the end of the day.
Fall isn't here quite yet, and I'm not ready to rush summer out the door.
But the first hints are here.
And for a little while, we get to stand somewhere between the two.