As a kid growing up on the east coast, autumn was always my favorite time of year. Summers could be brutally hot, compounded by oppressive  humidity. Winters were unpredictable with snow and cold one day, rain the next which froze on the roads creating treacherous “black ice”. Sitting in the middle was autumn. Temperatures would cool, the humidity would disappear and the trees would explode in a riot of reds, yellows and oranges.

Here in Northern California, the transition from summer into autumn is more subtle. The autumnal equinox falls on September 21st but I began to notice the seasonal shift several weeks ago. Around the beginning of the month we had a string of overcast  days with barely any sun. When the skies finally cleared I noticed that the angle of the sun had shifted, things looked just a little different. And the quality of light? Well, that’s my favorite. Autumn light has a unique goldenness to it, especially in late afternoon where everything looks dreamy. There are times when this type of light can turn my neighborhood into an impressionist painting. Where I live there are enough diciduous trees to put on a passable show when their leaves turn color, (when my neighbor’s Japanese maple tree is going off it looks like a mini Vermont). But the real show in our neck of the woods happens out in the vineyards. Acres of grape vines cover entire hillsides here in Sonoma County and when their leaves begin to turn, well that’s a spectacle to rival anything you’d see in New England. The gold of the autumn sunlight hits the gold of the grape vines, entire hillsides shimmer and vibrate in a mesmerizing display of color. It’s pretty damn incredible!

It’s early autumn now and the Earth is beginning to shake off the last vestiges of summer so it can still get pretty hot, every October we have what’s called “Indian Summer”. In a few weeks though, the vineyards will have already turned to gold and the dreamy autumn light will bathe everything in its glow. Nights are cooler now and the wind is mysterious. When the first rains come it  feels like a baptism: months of summer dust is washed away, foliage shines with a freshly washed glow, the smell of rain, absent for such a long time, is simply intoxicating.

I’m an avid birder. One of the ways I mark seasonal changes are by what I call the “avian shift change.” In autumn,  I say goodbye to the orioles and tanagers and welcome the white and golden crowned sparrows, and the Townsend’s, black-capped and yellow-rumped warblers. If I’m lucky I may get a brief visit from the rufous hummingbird. This tiny creature is a migrant that sometimes passes through our yard in autumn on the way south to its wintering grounds.

Our summer garden has given us nearly all that it can. It’s been a bountiful year. We’re now harvesting the last of the beans, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. The plants will soon wither and die, to be turned into the soil as compost for next year’s plants. 

So I pause, sit back and breathe it all in, this glorious time of year called autumn.

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