Autumn arrived precisely on schedule this year in Humptulips County. For once, the calendar and the weather decided to dance a pas de deux and the day of the autumnal equinox coincided with declining temperatures and the first rains of fall. You can always tell fall rains, for they are gusty and have a chill about them that is absent at any other time of year: a clammy, cold chill as opposed to the bitter cold and icy rain of winter; a long-term, musty, pervading chill inhabiting every nook and cranny with a determination  unknown to the rains of other seasons. Fall rain is noticeable because it is the dominant force and the secondary identifier of the season, serving, as it does, as the agent to bank and quiet the leafy fires – fall’s primary identifier.
Things are not often so efficient here, with the usual pattern being that Summer sneaks past the boundary imposed by the autumnal equinox for at least a week or two. Consequently, the autumnal equinox often passes relatively unnoticed, a mere date on the calendar with technical meaning only and notable only for the fact of having occurred. It usually is respected, but unhonored; noted for its significance, but ignored in fact.
Summer weather usually survives into mid-October, even if humanity’s feel for summer regularly departs during the long Labor Day weekend. Post-Labor Day summer survives almost as a will-o-the-wisp, as weather to be yearned about rather than to be enjoyed, coming after commerce and industry reassert their primacy over the lazy, somnolent days of high, hot suns. These September days are when summer devolves into Indian Summer.  You can never be certain their weather pattern will adhere on weekends when it might be enjoyed to its fullest, for these are the days of summer’s spume – a spray of warmth flung shoreward by its last cresting wave, a wave now receding rapidly from view.
Rain drums on my Library’s roof even as I type these words, its rhythm sufficing to venerate the books, to validate the human spirit contained within, and to implant the emotions which will cause the Library to become the center of my existence for this season and for the one to come. For these are magical rains: even as they bring the chill, they somehow stoke the home fires; even as they drown and quench autumn’s fire, they somehow feed the fires of human emotion.
