Autumn has always been one of my favorite seasons, because it comes at just the right time. (If it came in April, it just wouldn’t be autumn, would it?) But really: We’ve all noticed that time seems to pass more and more quickly as we get older. Where weeks used to fly by, now it’s months, and I can actually envision a time when it’s in danger of being years if I’m not careful. There are many possible contributing factors: the acceleration of time in general in these crazy modern times, the busy schedules we tend to keep, the routine of adult life, and so on. But one that often gets overlooked, I think, is that ever since we left school we’ve been becoming slightly unhinged. Adult life loses its seasonality.

Admittedly, holidays come along at the appropriate times, and we find that Christmas cannot be taken out of its seasonal context any more than Labor Day barbeques can be taken out of theirs. Trick-or-treating wouldn’t be the same if there weren’t so many fallen leaves to kick on your way from house to house.

The cyclical comings and goings of the seasons provide a very necessary anchor to a larger pattern. Think of what summer meant when you were in high school, how the elusive and infinitely far-off the approaching summer seemed in mid-April, the first day someone asked to open the window in the classroom, and then soon enough the windows became more often open than closed, and the smell of the first lawns being mowed would drift in, accompanied by the far off sounds of mowers and leaf blowers and occasionally bicycles. And how it progressed: The last day of school, the reckless frantic pursuit of fun in all its forms, the long warm June afternoons and the evenings that just wouldn’t end. And how July felt so much different from June, and August from July, and as the end of August approached you had to start pyschologically preparing yourself for the end of all this freedom. Only 14 more days ’til school starts, only 6 more days, only, man, it’s tomorrow! Where did this summer go?

And soon enough, always sooner than you expected, fall arrived, accompanied by sweaters, and collectively we bundled ourselves against the impending winter in the nostalgia of flannel and the melancholy of wool sock. Clear fall days, as today was in Washington, DC, when the air is clear and cool and even the weakest of breezes untrees bushels of leaves, there’s a feeling of transition in the air, and glances between strangers passing on the street at two-thirds their usual hurried pace confirms that these serenely beautiful afternoons are so precisely because we know what’s coming next. We know how ephemeral this beauty is. Things will soon become softer and darker and colder. We will hide indoors for months, and the light will continue to angle its way in obliquely.

I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for five years. Every Santa Fe day’s clear blue sky makes even the winter feel pretty summery. People are often surprised to learn that it snows there (I think they get it confused with Arizona), but at 7500 feet, it gets surprising extremes of temperature. Blizzards blow through from the neighboring mountains, and then the next day if the sun is out you can walk around town in a flannel and shorts if you choose and watch the snow melt. I wore my sandals for a good part of most winters. As Santa Fe approaches late September, the distant yellow of the aspens in the mountains suggests that autumn may be near, but the nearby juniper and piñon, ever-green, stay mysteriously tightlipped about the passage of seasons—if they have managed to survive the summer drought.

I moved to Santa Fe in part because I could no longer bear the long, miserable, gray and frigid Chicago winters I had endured for my whole life. And it was a fine choice. The hopelessness that had lurked in the dark hours of every January during every winter I could remember did not follow me there. It didn’t know where to look, and could not avoid drying out in the perpetual sun. But at the same time, in clear serene sky-blue New Mexico, where you could count on 330-odd cloudless blue skies a year, I came just a bit unhinged. The long slow slide into winter by means of kaleidoscope never happened. Winter was summery, and every day was a variation on the same theme. After a couple of years I began to miss the sense of closing and reopening that the rest of the world had to go through every year.

So it has been that, after a long absence, autumn and I have been reunited. Ephemeral or not, these days will ease me into winter well.