Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Seventy Four

Yesterday was as hot as a September day can be, the sun bright and the sky cloudless. My love and I spent the day wandering about the markets, collecting the bounty of the season. Peaches, nectarines, and apples. Green beans, potatoes, corn and beets. The fruit and the beans we will freeze, hoping to steal some of the season’s freshness and vitality to warm ourselves on a winter’s day.

Today fall has arrived, the temperature plunging over twenty degrees from yesterday’s high. One could say without warning, except for the fact that the evenings and mornings have been growing cooler and cooler these past weeks. The day was overcast, miserable looking, and finally, after what seemed hours of procrastination, this evening the sky opened and rain fell.

It is the first moisture in over a month and so welcome. In fact there is a fire in the mountains to the west that the cold and rain will help to quench. August was so hot and dry that the leaves on the trees outside our house are turning brown. Soon they will be falling. We do not get magnificent autumns of golden and red leaves. Instead the leaves will brown from drought, and those that do not will turn in a matter of days. One day green, the next a dull yellow, before falling unceremoniously to the ground.

There will be plenty of warm days still to come. In a day or two the weather will turn and it may feel like summer again. My tomatoes and herbs and greens all still grow. But today still feels like an announcement rather than a foreshadowing. The seasons are turning now and there is no holding them back.