rhymes with autumn, and there are surely foretastes. Red leaves here, there, mornings in the 50s. September, though! --- summer often roars back, sultry, heavy, raging against its own dying. But daylight shrinks, leaves crispen and wither, and all the coffeeshops go pumpkin-spice, for Pete's sake. By Oscar Wilde's birthday in mid-October, we're all right. One can walk a mile or more without succumbing to heatstroke. And the foliage starts doing its thing, its annual flash and flare of colour and fire. Give me a year of October, maybe early November as well. I'm a sucker for Thomas Hardy bleakness; I swoon for the raven's cough in winter sticks; I thrill to the sun gone pale as though chidden of God.