We're still so agrarian in place and time

The mornings are different now than they were just a few short weeks ago.  The sun is out, but it's only in the mid-50's as I drive in this morning.  The forecast is all sun globes for the week ahead, but nothing tops the mid-70's in that forecast.  The weather is nothing but comfortable now in this idyllic pseudo-season; nobody will be complaining about the weather this week.

Melissa says a significant portion of the lavender is still blooming and there are still a few hearty roses worth admiring and smelling.  I know the beans are still yielding, but they are slowing.  Tomatoes are pretty much done, the last tomatillo has been harvested and the plants are just about ready to pull for the season.  It is a ritual we tend to leave until fall is well settled so as not to violate the remnant of our summer.  Or, as Karina Borowicz says in her poem, September Tomatoes:

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit. 

I'm torn, like the season.  Part of me, if I am honest, is ready for the crisp sharp air of fall and the settling-in activities that come with it.  No doubt the shortening daylight registers with something primordially internal I've long-since lost conscious contact with.  Part of me, though, is very much not ready to see summer leaving, with its bright and bounty and its sensory excesses.

The morning paper lists how many minutes
the sunlight lasts--fact without a hint
of the three minutes lost since
yesterday. In late September, even
those who do not track the time,
as I do, can be startled by the rapid,
sure decline of days growing
hooded at both ends.
   - Summer's Last Tomatoes, by Jacquelyn Malone

Convocation today, the campus stirs in earnest as most of the employees return to kick off the new year. Though the college year technically starts with summer quarter, fall is the real beginning of the school year in most minds.  School starts--as it always has done--when the harvest is in, when the stars form certain predictable patterns, when the birds start to migrate.

We are, after all, still so agrarian in our collective sense of where we are in space and time.

Today's full playlist:

• My Maudlin Career, Camera Obscura
• Pieces of the Sun (Radio Version), Test Your Reflex
• Donald Macgillavry (The Fight With The Blackfeet), Lewis & Clark Soundtrack
• The Story, Brandi Carlile
• On the Other Ocean, David Behrman