Blue-eyed grass and blue mistflower. October 2025.
With all apologies to Huey Lewis & and The News, I need a new song. Its lyrics will borrow from the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always do what you want,….but if you try sometimes, you just might find—you do what you need.” Yeah. That. We were told once to pay attention to our Inner Child, and I’ve done that far, far too much in my life. That little pouty bastard gets everything he wants to my usual detriment. I’m going to start listening to my Inner Parent. Maybe I’ll graduate to Inner Adult. (transactional analysis—I can’t escape the cultural references.)
Anyway, it’s fall y’all. The dusky red of the dogwood illumines in direct sunlight and dances a colored jig with the wind-bestirred poplar leaves behind them.
Morning sun strikes leaves of American (Carolina) beech–at least that’s what my plant ID app says. The temp was cool but not brisk around 8:00 a.m. September 2025.
Our weather this summer has been a bit topsy-turvy to me. June’s usual onslaught of highly humid, hot days which normally starts after my birthday on the 8th, arrived instead in the final days of May. July, a month that has seen weeks-long streaks above 100 was hot again but avoided the triple-digits. The official high temps, nevertheless, hit the 90’s every day but two, and we started to collect our normal rainfall (in fact, a little extra).
August, though, should have continued the hot weather and brought some brushes with tropical storms. Instead, the month opened with a high or 86, then 79, and high temps stayed in the 70’s six more days after that. We collected over 5.33 inches of rain in the first 11 days. The entire month easily bested our normal rainfall total 7.99 inches versus 4.71 inches. We saw the 90’s only once, on the 17th, when the thermometer got to 92 while we were in Belgium. The weirdness continued when the humidity broke weeks early—usually it’s the second week of September—and overnight lows descended into the 60’s and 50’s never to rise above 70 again as I write this on the 12th.
As mentioned, September normally sees the departure of high humidity and the extension of lovely days in the 80-85 degree range. Instead, we started with lows in the 50’s and high’s in the 70’s except for a four-day streak of 84-94. Things dry out in the rainfall department normally, too, with the usual rainfall being about two inches. We’re on pace for that.
Even the tulip poplars think it’s weirder. Normally they start to get stressed in July and drop a lot of yellowed leaves. This year, only a smattering fell then and continued through August. When the way cooler temps of September came, they acted as if we’d crossed the equinox, nights were getting crisper, and large numbers began to fall: not yellowed this time but a leathery brown. IT’S NOT FALL YET, I want to scream at them, but by most measures we are crossing that threshold now, not in early to mid-October per my observation of usual.
I had thought the broad strokes of climate changes meant an accented version of our normal curve: hot months would be hotter, cold months would be a little more mild, and we would see more rainfall here in the American Southeast. I did NOT expect we would just take all the normal readings, throw them in a hat marked “Your Weather,” and pull them out randomly!
At least the blossoms have come out on the roses of Sharon, but they are later this year. Contrary to the wishes of my native plants landscaper, I will not be removing all of these beauties, aggressive invaders though they be. (Honestly, they’re growing under a porch, behind the garbage bins, anywhere and everywhere.)
Rose of Sharon. September 2025.Rose of Sharon. September 2025.
Like so many things in the American South, the arrival of autumn takes its own sweet time. I should say “fall” also because at two syllables, both of which have a “u” in them, “it “autumn” just seems a bit pretentious here. Our first inkling summer is nearing its end (besides a simple look at the calendar) occurs when “someone turns the humidity off” as a former boss of mine put it. (He was from Michigan.) Humidity levels build quickly in early June, and by mid-month your A/C chokes on the amount of water it’s removing from your indoor atmosphere. Around Labor Day a similarly rapid decline in humidity takes place. It seems even quicker than the ramp up because the lack of humidity means heat no longer lingers around all night, ready to leap into action at dawn. Instead of staying in the high 60’s and low 70’s suddenly one’s body registers temps that are downright cool at dawn. What follows seems like a coda to the summer, a time of 72-80 degree weather, mostly sunny weather, and dawn temperatures in the low 50’s.
For me fall can be said to be truly here when leaves start to turn color. Except for stressed trees and shrubs, this usually occurs around the second to third weekend in October. Even then it’s a slow, drawn out affair. This cluster of leaves seemed representative to me. We’re in the last week of October, and the trees reluctantly turn various colors dependent on species.
Fall in Raleigh, NC. October 2024.
We arrived home Monday after a quick dash north for a wedding, when I realized, “Hey the dogwood is really turning color.” One of the first to herald spring with its blossoms, and one of the first to leaf out, it’s also one of the first to say, “Nope, gettin’ a mite too cold. Goodbye.”
Front yard dogwood. Shaded trees in back a more dusky red. October 2024.
And finally this photo to illustrate the sadness of invasive species. The Virginia creeper is native to central and eastern North America. It knows that it’s fall here. The English ivy isn’t native to North America at all. The latter will hang around nearly all winter, and in milder winters I believe I haven’t seen it turn colors at all. It chokes out most undergrowth if allowed, and it adds weight to trees if allowed to proliferate. It creates an eco-desert.
Tree with ivy and creeper, L foreground; tree with mostly ivy center. October 2024.
It never really began. One victory sandwiched by defeats and garnished with the end to their season? No, the machine ran down and died. Just like that.
I confess to you, my brothers and sisters in Philadelphia baseball, that I greatly sinned. After the Mets rattled off six unanswered runs in Game 3, I quit drinking Yuengling, the talismatic beer whose magic didn’t fail so much as it failed to show up. I lost faith. Our boys lost. Yesterday, with a sinking feeling that foretold the eventual outcome of Game 4, I didn’t watch the game, and I didn’t drink the final Yuengling in the fridge. There it is, Philly. You can blame me–although there are more than one million folks in SE Pennsylvania who certainly felt more pessimistic than I.
Now I face my most depressing season without the solace of fan-fueled postseason baseball. I detest cold weather, and autumn’s ever-cooling presence reminds me of it, like one of those guests who comes to the party late, immediately begins to suck the joy from the festive partygoers, drives away the liveliest guests first, and eventually leaves you alone in your cold, wintery room. Autumn’s first cold mornings might look pretty, but they signal the beginning of the end for summer’s warmth. I need the hopes of postseason baseball. When baseball’s postseason rolls around, fans fall into three groups: those whose teams weren’t expected to make it and didn’t; those whose teams were expected to make it and didn’t; and those who have varying degrees of hope that this timewe’ll go all the way. When teams drop out of the postseason, as the Phillies just did, their fans join the middle group, the Group of Dashed Hopes. At times like this we say, “I would rather they were an up-and-coming team that wasn’t expected to make the postseason than to think they were going all the way only to watch them crash and burn.”
Of course, this isn’t true. Phillies fans suffered through two lengthy periods where year after year it seemed no one in charge had a plan for making the team better. I’m talking about the years 1994-2004 after 1993’s appearance in the World Series (the Joe Carter game!), and the period from 2012-2019 following the five-year run of 2007-2011. We know that having no hope tastes worse than this, a bland meal which becomes ever more unpleasant as the season unfolds. (Ask a White Sox fan.) But to savor a .586 season and the first division title in a dozen years, only to be served this…this…what can we call a 1-3 performance in their first round? Something steaming for sure. And to the Mets! There are many insufferable fans in baseball, but the ones who flood your ballpark from barely more than 100 miles away? Who fill your ballpark with their “Let’s go, Mets!” chants? Who have thrown beverages and even batteries at players (1999, John Rocker, Atlanta Braves) and yet somehow dodged the rep while it sticks to Phillies fans like an undeserved judgment? No, please, not to the Mets.
All because I failed to drink a Yuengling? Surely there are greater sins, oh gods of baseball. Give me back my joy. Make this autumnal chill release its grip on my baseball heart. Send me a reason to hope again.
