I’m in the final week of the local autumn observational complaint: You can’t make autumn stay, you can’t show off the season properly. I’m still trying to do it, even though it can’t be done. But I’m still trying.

It seems like there’s a shift in the tint of the golden light from the late sun. It’s still pleasant out, but there’s a feeling in the air. The optimism of crisp morning air is taking on a new meaning with a nearer, sharper crispness in the air. It isn’t a foreboding, but a coming to a sense of reality.

There was a mom and a child playing beneath that tree, while the dad was taking pictures of them. The boy was in his element and having a great time, but the parents were trying to document all that was passing before them. We must deliberately categorize certain things out of doors, in certain lights. The kids will get bigger, the trees will become exposed twigs, the blue sky turns grey. Before you know it, the next family photos feature a slightly older kid. And by the time they take those pictures, things will be green again. Or, covered in snow if their brave. And so they are out right now, setting a memory.

That’s a lot to take from watching a young family for a few seconds, but there’s a certain chill in the breeze.

Two weeks ago I wrote:

It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.

So I’m doing that this week, which feels like the peak of the leaf turn. Here are two more examples from campus.

This is the newly renamed Francis Morgan Swain Student Building:

Before women could vote, Francis Morgan Swain was making waves on the IU campus. She lobbied the university for a space meant for female students. She was in school here for two years, from 1889 to 1891. During that time she raised $6,500 from alumni and members of the community — that’s about $200,000 today. Her husband, Joseph, a math professor, was the ninth president of the university. They stayed on to lead the university for nine years. She came back in 1904 for the groundbreaking, laid a cornerstone and she was here again when the building was formally opened in 1906. In September of last year the university rededicated the building in her honor.

And this is the side of our building, Franklin Hall, the brand new 110-year-old, $26 million dollar renovation, featuring all the bells and whistles journalism and broadcast and video game majors and comm scholars could ask for.

My office is somewhere behind that tree.