Autumn is my favorite season. It always has been. Even when it meant school was back and lazy summer days would be coming to an end. I loved it. I grew up in a farming community, in the mountains and it was the beginning stages of what would become a long hibernation. Where the transition between life outdoors was slowly given over to life indoors. Autumn is when darkness comes creeping from the morning and evening into the daytime hours, sending sunlight retreating to the southern side of the planet, letting a cool dark wash over the north. The change manifests itself in the way people dress and the things people eat and the things people do to entertain themselves. Tee shirts become sweaters which become jackets and eventually coats and somewhere along that trajectory there are football games and Halloween parties and a harvest that makes profitable the entire previous years efforts of many farmers. Autumn is that glorious time where we congratulate ourselves for having made it through the better half of the year, just before we snuggle into whatever winter we give ourselves. I live in Los Angeles at the moment and even here where the weather in November can feel like June in my home state of Idaho, that feeling is still present. Sitting in the heat of a late September day after a night of rain, the sight of children returning to school and the ever shorter days can still strike a chord. I enjoy the idea of sitting quietly drinking a warm cup of coffee or coco or cider, bundled on a patio with friends in dwindling early twilight talking about whatever might be talked about. Winter will come next to most of the country and it will bite and nag and bring more hardship than we care to remember from all the winters previous. But before we give ourselves over to it, lets all enjoy these final moments before this summer's afterglow fades into memory and reflect on the fact that we are all alive on this wondrous ball and that we made it almost all the way around the sun once again.