Is it too late to sign up for the Biosphere?

Now that all manner of natural disaster have thrown their wicked curve across the east side of the map, I can feel something more natural than disaster wrapping its arms around me. It’s that change. When Mother Nature turns the dial, her finger nails scratching at the low numbered stations in search of the maturity in those somber notes. It’s when the leaves breach and scatter and the wind begins blowing you into sweaters and windbreakers.

The kids have their scheds, the sun begins its “Going out of Business” sale, slashing 50 to 75 percent off its summer inventory. And you can smell autumn’s push in the cinnamon leaves gone shower. You realize that it always seems to go by much too quickly, the summer. Sort of like that love affair with the one who got away. It’s gone before it felt entirely here to begin with. So you fetch the blankets and woolens. You fit the storm windows and gamble with the Sunday circulars shock and awe.

I’m taking to the front porch, clenching a drink I’ve switched up on now that Halloween is inching through the driveway and the Fourth is on the Interstate. My sunshine pilsner, replaced by a more serious palette of amber. My sandals living smaller days to the very last one before hibernation. I stand on the top step and come closer to imagining snow than sand.

The days go missing in piecemeal and the nights go longer and colder and blank. The holidays bunch. And the menace of Jack Frost’s pugilistic skills is training hard and rounding into form.

Crap.