Today is the sort of day that made me hate autumn less: nothing bare and raw in the wind, no lingering, distant promise of snow. The temperature waits, held at sixty-eight: the overnight low and today's high. Stop, it says. Rest in this one day where no season slides forward or back. This is fall for its own sake.
Even the trees are held between: half-changed and patchy yellow-green. The forecase promises snow before the weekend, and yesterday was capped with the kind of sun that can boil the inside of a closed-up car and turns cats to languid pools in the light. The month pulls polar, but today, autumn is arrested, its own creature for the sun's full arc.
