Ode to the Last Days of Summer | In Pictures

It's a kind of end of summer cleaning day, and it's just kinda overcast outside. Still warm with the breath of summer, but as if the autumn is fighting to come out.

I look at the trees and the flowers and I just see it, in the light of this cloudy warm day, the first signs on a September day. September, the in between month.

The month of the last summer bonfires and star flung skies, the last days of the wind in green leaves, and the smell of fresh cut hay. The month before things just really start changing, and you can feel it in the morning as the harvest moon fades, and the wheat lays cleared and shaven, and the blackbirds wave in flocks over sunflower fields as you drive by on your way home.

And I'm the one who just wants to savor the in between, to let anticipation build for the first, honest-to-goodness, blessed first day you can just really call chilly. And I can look out at the day and I can smile back, because this is the first day of autumn for me.

We just brush by it all too soon, just like Laura Timmins said. We have to write it down, we have to capture it because someday I'll have someone asking me questions, just like I ask them now, "What was it like? Back then?"

And when the seasons tick toward their beginnings, I'll have something to answer them.