Gossamer mornings…

 

The light changes first. You can always tell when autumn is sneaking in, even before the air gets that crisp edge everyone romanticizes. For me, it starts with the mornings. The light is different. Softer somehow, slower, as if it has hit the snooze button a couple of times before making its way through the blinds. Summer light rushes in, loud and insistent. Autumn light meanders.

It has that golden quality, like someone turned down the harsh fluorescent settings on life and finally switched us back to warm glow. My coffee tastes even better in this kind of light, which is probably a lie I tell myself every September, but I believe it anyway.

There’s a hush to early autumn mornings. Not silence, exactly, but a quieter texture to everything. The birds still sing, the neighborhood is still the neighborhood, but somehow it feels like the world is in a softer register. It makes you want to pause. To look out the window longer than usual. To remember that you are a person with a body who exists in time, and that time is shifting again.

The I like the way the sun angles in now, lower and kinder. It makes familiar spaces look unfamiliar: the way shadows stretch, the way light lays across the floor. The season reminds you that nothing is static, not even the way your living room looks at 7 a.m.

And maybe that’s the quiet lesson of these mornings: change doesn’t have to arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it slips in through the window in a softer shade of gold, and waits for you to notice.