Waves coming through.

We've hit autumn light. It's one thing for it to be cool in the mornings; it's another for the axial tilt to shift in such a way as to combine with favorable winds and decreasing daylight hours to create the very particular kind of light that comes in the early days of the season. It's light that's clean, and faint. It's easiest to see looking up at the leaves that haven't fallen or lost their color yet - they're not as reflective. They're not dull by any means. Just less vibrant.

They're paying less attention to the temperature, and more to the light. Not a bad way to notice how the world moves, really. My father - who spent almost half his life in California - told me how he had a hard time adjusting to the lack of heavy seasonal shifts until he started focusing on how the quality of light started changing around August and September. When the world really starts to change. What I miss isn't the comparatively smaller shifts of the seasons so much as that the weather here never settled in. This last summer especially: overcast days throughout July and August, rain taking its time coming and going. Warm snaps in February and March. I've joked there's three weeks in autumn and three weeks in spring when nobody in New York City needs a heater or air conditioning, and I wouldn't make that joke if it wasn't true.

We're in those three autumn weeks right now, and I'm going to focus on the light for as long as it's here.