Equinox.

I am informed that the autumnal equinox will be at 4:02 this afternoon where I live. In a way I am unprepared for this event. In that same way I am unprepared for every event.

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Sometimes I think the key to nostalgia is that we forget what we were worried about at the time. As a kid I had elderly relatives who remembered World War II fondly -- not all the fighting and unpleasantness, but rather the swing music, the good times, the feeling of being united for a cause, the great movies. I have to think that twenty-five years later they must have felt like they got smacked in the head with a shovel. The years 1944 and 1969 were as distant as a single culture could be.

I find myself at that age where I think over past events, trying to fit what was going through my mind at the time with what was going on in the world. Sometimes it's pretty comical. I wish I could go back to the years of my childhood sometimes, not as a child again, but to have a look around as an adult. The world has changed so much so fast that I can scarcely believe it happened in my lifetime, and I'm not even that old. (I'm not! I'm not!) I just want to get hold of how life was before I go on to how it is.

But this wasn't what I had intended to write about, which is autumn. Some trees are turning already; maybe the ceaseless rain this summer pushed them along. Up the street a neighbor's chestnut tree is thopping the asphalt below with those spiky green bombs. The squirrels are looking particularly furtive. I don't look so hot myself.

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Even though this was not a brutal summer (no heat dome, thank you), I'm glad to see it go. I had a lot of work and no vacation. In fact, I still have no vacation. Wah!

You know who else doesn't? Our friends in the hurricane-torn south and Caribbean, and our wildfired friends out west. Whatever I may complain about, they've had it brutally hard. Perhaps we'll all be happy when winter is here. Rain for the scorched west, sunshine for the south. And up here we'll get one of those blizzards where you see trucks driving in forty-foot high trenches of snow, as if Moses had been an Inuit. It'll be our turn.

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However hard summer may be some years, I invariably miss the sunshine. I don't know that I suffer from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), as I am a pretty SAD sack all year round. Days of endless darkness do tend to dampen my spirits after a while, as I've noted before. It's okay in October, even into November if it's not too rainy, and December has Santa Claus to distract us, but January, February... by the middle of March it's a toss-up between suicide and homicide. Fortunately I've always managed to hold on until April. 

Regardless, here we go again. I have no plans to escape to Machu Picchu and enjoy summer again while others freeze in darkness here. As I always say, winter makes a man of you. A cold, mean, bitter man.

Bring down the curtain! The days are more than half night, starting now.