The Air Changed Overnight

September thirteenth. At some point between Wednesday and Thursday, fall arrived. Not officially, officially it's still ten days away, but the air didn't check the calendar. I woke up, walked to the kitchen to start coffee, and there it was: that flat, cooled-down quality to the morning light that has no summer equivalent. The window looked the same. The windowsill looked the same, the collapsed bowl, the letterpress card, the photograph of my mother at twenty-two, all in their places. But the light on them was different. Lower. Paler. A little less forgiving in the way that fall light is, which is somehow also the way it's more honest.

I stood there longer than I needed to, mug in both hands, not quite ready to let the season be what it was. There's always a version of myself that wants one more warm day, one more evening where it's light until eight and the air doesn't have that particular September edge to it. I didn't get that this year. It just shifted. I noticed the way the light hit the collapsed bowl differently, the shadow it threw was longer, and then I went and got the camera.

The windowsill in September light, it looks different. It is different.

The windowsill has been the same arrangement for months now. The bowl, the card, the photograph, they've become furniture to the point where I walk past them without seeing them most days. But the fall light does something to that sill that the summer light doesn't. It comes in at a lower angle and it's cooler, and suddenly everything on there looks like it has a slight shadow it wasn't casting before. It sounds like a small thing. It's a small thing. But I took three photographs of it anyway, and I already knew which one I'd keep before I looked at them.

I don't have a lot to say about this one. The air changed overnight and I noticed, and I stood at the window for a while, and then I made my coffee and got on with the day. September does that, it just shows up and expects you to rearrange yourself around it. I am, apparently, rearranging.