In The Air

Sarah: The first actual fall morning, the one where you had to get up in the night and put another blanket on the bed, and something about the air and the sunshine is making me almost weep with nostalgia. [...]

Paul: Does the smell of the air today remind you of another time? [...]

Bernard: [...] The biographer had left the house in late-afternoon warm sunshine and had casually walked himself, despite nature's beauty, into a small gloom. He imagined it had come from sensing change in the season, one day to the next. August was a masked month: it looked like summer and conspired with the fall; like February it would attempt to hide what it was about. Dubin had uncovered bright-green shoots under dead leaves in February. In the woods today he had spied a flare of red in a broad maple. A sense of short season: Northeast cheat. The days had secretly cast off ballast and were drifting toward autumn. Cold air descended to the roots of trees. The leaves, if you touched, were drying. The noise of bees sucking pale flowers, of crickets rasping, seemed distant. Butterflies, flitting among trees, flaunted their glad rags a moment before generating and expiring. Dubin felt change and could not bear it. He forbade his mind to run to tomorrow. Let winter stay in its white hole.
Beating his chest he flails at time. Time dances on. "Now I am ice, now I am sorrel." He shakes his useless fist. [...]

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