The In-Between Season

Autumn arrives without warning,
borrowing cold winds from winter and sunlight from summer.
Some days are reluctant to leave summer behind, their warmth like
brief pauses between breaths,
while others are bone-chilling and bare. In the cold, breaths turn into mist,
vanishing.

This is when we slip on cardigans,
when we roll out our sweatshirts for lazy days.
This is when we cover ourselves, wrapped up in knitted sweaters.
We pick at each other’s and the threads come loose,
but we still leave home every day without a jacket.

We’ll wake up early on weekends and wait for the sun to rise.
When it’s bright enough, we wander fields with the grass at our ankles.
We return home with the smell of sunkissed plants and leave
pumpkins outside on our porches.
This is our harvest today,
our last adventures before roads get too slick, before
we lose green for soft white blankets of snow.

We wait for and dread the cold days to come. Autumn
is not good enough. Autumn tears leaves off the trees,
shoos away the sun, warns us about winter.
It doesn’t announce itself because it is
too small for summer and too weak for winter.
With the first snow, we’ll trade golden fall
for white and gray, and we will color autumn out.