on the first day of fall . . .

I don’t know the official date of the first day of Autumn (though I guess it’s just a Google search away), but for me the “first day” of Fall each year is the first time I wake up, step outside and feel that certain cool breeze—not just any cool breeze mind you, but that certain one—the one that brushes annually across my skin and reminds me again of James Thomson’s verse, “In every breeze the power of philosophic melancholy comes!” For me then, today was the first day of Fall.

“Philosophic melancholy” may be a bit too morose, but it does intimate to a certain degree the much more substantively pensive mood that generally strikes me about this time each year. Wordsworth (in my very favorite poem ever) describes it perfectly: “And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime; of something far more deeply interfused.” Maybe it’s because the fall represents the end of the “care-free” days of summer, or because it foreshadows the impending cold dark days of winter: whatever the reason, I feel more thoughtful in the fall.

Well, for all my supposed thoughtfulness, I really haven’t anything else to write today; Yeats was also apparently enamored with this season so let me leave you with a bit of his famous poem “Wild Swans,” enjoy:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
As under an autumn twilight,
Still waters mirror sky.