The long, slow days of mid-September are finally here. The kids are in school and traffic is slow in front of Bayview Elementary and Cardinal Gibbons. Hotels are empty and the restaurants that treat residents with contempt during the busy nights of the Season are suddenly showing appreciation for the local folk. It is official: fall is in the air.
With those five little words I can instantly identify a transplant from a real Floridian. Florida transplants will roll their eyes and look at me like I am crazy; real Floridians will nod their heads and agree with me: “Yep, it does feel like fall.”
Spend some time outside and you’ll feel the difference. I’ll grant you its still hot, but it’s not July-hot. The mornings and evenings are perceptibly cooler and the days are less humid. With less humidity, the light is clearer and purer and reflects off the foliage, still shiny and clean from the summer rains.
My animals know the difference. The rains don’t come with the same predictable frequency as in the summer and are not accompanied by the thunder and lightning that make June afternoons a misery for the dogs and cats. With less rain the grass can go 10 or more days between cuttings and the foliage is not growing with the wanton intensity of August.
The sun shows the difference; in mid-September it begins its trek back towards the South and as it does my lazy old cat begins her annual migration from the sofa to the bed. There, beneath a south-facing window, she will spend long, lovely autumn afternoons napping in a sunbeam and purring quietly to herself.
When I was a kid I envied my Northern cousins their autumns. I had a Rockwellian image of yellows and reds, of bright blue skies and crisp, clear nights and the anticipation of the harvest. I longed for pumpkins and acorns and piles of leaves for the jumping, but as I grew older I saw a Northern fall for what it is: an all-too brief precursor to six months of gray and dreary skies and bitter cold; to an eternity of shoveling snow and scraping windshields.
Fall in South Florida is subtle and quiet. Our garish period of yellows and red is the summer, a time of poincianas and birds of paradise, of hibiscus and ixora. Our fall is a season of anticipation of the winter to come, when days are crisp and cool and skies are bright blue; a time of boat parades and holiday lights, of northern friends coming down to escape the cold. The time of year when tropical storms are a distant memory and we remember why we put up with the heat and the humidity and the bugs and the hurricanes.
Yep, it does feel like fall.