The wind changed and Canada sent a telegram: We’ll be coming to visit soon. The note was delivered on the back of an intermittent series of rain showers this morning. You could see it in the sky and see it on the ground and you could feel the season’s first cool temperatures in the air. Fall finally showed up. It was nice that it waited this long to arrive, I suppose, because it somehow would seem greedy to ask for more summer.

Even still, no matter how much you love summer, there comes a time with hitting 90 degrees seems tiresome. These days that occurs in late September for me. Whereas fall, you want that to stick around. The air smells fine and things are crisp and all the parts of the offerings of fall seem appropriate. The leaves and some of the dishes and how every day is allowed to be different, these are the best things about autumn.

Once you get used to the idea of bracing yourself for something different every time you open a door, you fit right into fall. And about that time the whole thing changes again. But not too soon. You waited long enough to arrive, do us one more solid and forestall winter. How’s January sound to you? And of course we’ll be waiting for the early arrival of spring. Because the weather patterns here owe me, and I’d like to cash in next year in the form of spring arriving in mid-March, and thank you.

That’s really the problem. Winter is such a thing it sort of ruins the rest of the seasons. Spring arrives too late, and goes too soon. The summer is rather nice, but it’s July before you get over the shell shock of winter in April. And then from July on you are just dreading the inevitability of … that … again.

We are wrapping up the last of the fun advertisements from my grandfather’s Reader’s Digest. I’ve been slowly putting interesting things from his old books on my site. His books being one of the best ties I have to the man, it seemed like a nice exercise. Plus some of this stuff is just fun. If you click this link you can see all the books that are online so far, including some of his elementary and junior high text books. If you click this one you can see all of the images I’ve uploaded from this particular Digest, which was from October 1966. If you are all caught up, however, just click the image below to see the last four ads, from 53 years ago.

And next week we’ll start working our way through another book. I believe there’s one more Reader’s Digest in the stash, and after that we’ll dive into some other dusty and ancient tome.

I slept the day away, quite literally. But I did manage to … let’s see, I caught up on some stuff on the DVR. I was only two months behind, so this is viewed as progress. I cleaned out a part of the refrigerator and did some dishes. I admired the sink which I repaired earlier in the week. And there’s the book thing here and … really, it the day was dominated by that cold and rainy vibe.

(The title, above, is a slight adaption of a line from Humbert Wolfe, an early 20th century British poet. He was a famous author in his own time, though slightly read today. He published about 40 books in his free time, as he was also a civil servant, which seems the appropriate speed for a poet. I imagine him surrounded by a lot of tweed and smoke.)