Family

It's late afternoon, that notch of time between school's daily retreat, but well before dinner calls everyone inside. The runners club trots briskly down the street, its cavalcade not laboring quite as much as it did before summer decided to surrender.

Windows are open. Screens serve as conduits that allow cool breezes to pass in the door of a kitchen and come out a window carrying the perfume of fried chicken, biscuits and slow-simmering essentials it was just too blamed hot to cook a month ago.

Officially, fall doesn't arrive until Monday, but a calendar can't dictate a change in spirit.

This has always been a favorite time of year. Meandering the neighborhood doesn't seem like an act of sweltering, masochistic foolishness. People working their gardens, well-aged by months of heat, don't mind sidling up for a chat as they continue fall's horticultural resuscitation.

Shorter days mean wider smiles.

Amen.

It's the perfect season to observe the world around us. Take stock, if you will, of things that we seem too flustered, harried or uncomfortable to notice in the previous weeks.

Yeah, school keeps parents and children busy — don't even get started on the merry-go-round of youth sports — but somehow things seem a little more relaxed when the thermometer isn't stoked.

Imagine waiting in lines for gas this past week if it had been 98 degrees. The pumps wouldn't have been the only things that were flammable.

Cooling off does that for us. It's a mystery, one whose blessing probably shouldn't be queried too deeply.

Little questions from little ones, however, do get asked even though no concrete answers are forthcoming. They call attention to things grownups may have once noticed but now overlook amid the flurry of grown-up worry.

What makes the sky so blue in the fall? Look up, and, indeed, the mid-afternoon sky is almost painfully, purely blue.

Why do squirrels chase each other, if they never get caught? A pair of Mammalia's silliest creatures is skittering around a pine tree chattering and sending bark flying like confetti at a wedding.

What makes it gray in the morning? It's not fog, and it's not smoke, so what is it? Look out the car window at the passing countryside. Thin tendrils of mist wrap around low-lying trees and hover across the tops of ponds.

If you rub yourself in s'mores, will you really stick to a wall?

No one wonders that in summer. It's too hot to sit idly around a bonfire and toast marshmallows to a gooey, golden brown. Any summertime s'more toasting is strictly business.

Perhaps that is why fall seems to be the season of fellowship. The Holidays, as Thanksgiving to New Year's seems to be known now, are too stressful, too expensive for everyone to enjoy. Summer — well, we know what makes us cranky in summer.

But fall is the time of festivals, tailgating and Homecoming at the alma mater. Listen to a marching band warming up and see if your heart doesn't perk up. Watch the weather forecast and count down — seriously — when it's going to be cold enough, long enough for that first batch of chili.

That calls for another Amen.