Fall is here. Thank God.

We had a big cold front come through a couple days ago. It has changed everything. The sticky, nasty, smelly weather (yes, my town gets SMELLY when there's been high pressure for too long - outside my house I can smell what everyone is cooking, even down to the Dairy Queen a couple blocks away). The light is taking on that more muted quality that fall light has, and the sky is no longer that hard metallic whitish-blue it is in the summer.

(I don't like summer. I especially don't like it here because it gets into a rut where it's hot, humid-but-no-rain, high-pressure, and dusty for WEEKS on end).

I cleaned house yesterday afternoon; I have to get the piano tuner in and I don't like having people come into my house when it's a mess. (I admit it: I worry a bit every time it gets bad and I'm too busy to clean it - "What if I fall and break my leg and friends have to come and save me? What if I get really sick and my colleagues have to bring me food?")

I also gathered up the old boxes I had been saving up. We don't do much recycling here, but cardboard recycling is a thing. The bad news is if it's not 7:30 am to 4 pm M through Th, you have to take the stuff way out to the edge of town to leave it at the center. I thought about just leaving it in my car until later today when I might have time, but, meh - I had to get a can of pineapple anyway for something I was cooking, so I had to go out.

I drove out to the south of town. The recycling center is in kind of an industrial area and on a Sunday afternoon it's deserted. You get the "last person in the world" feeling going out there. It's not an unpleasant feeling to me, especially when I really know I'm not the "last person in the world." These days I don't just go out and drive much - I know a lot of people who do, some of my students talk about how the big thing on Saturdays after you got your license and access to a car was just to drive around and see what there was to see. I'm too busy for that, a lot, and I'm also too cheap. (I look at the price of gas.)

But it was nice to get out, in the lengthening light of an early-fall afternoon, and just drive a little. And clear all those boxes out of my house. (I could just put them in the trash, but my rollcart is smallish, and you can get fined if it's overfilled).

I feel a lot better feeling like fall is coming. Intellectually I know summer cannot last forever, but emotionally it feels that way to me sometime - that it will never cool down, that the weather will never change.