The year of eight months

This year, we didn't seem to have a May and a June.

I kept trying to put my winter coat away, then having to retrieve it.

Summer hit in July, and our usual yearly drought started about the middle of that month, and continued on, and September and October were subsumed into a three-month August.

Yesterday evening, it felt like autumn for the first time this year.  I needed a jacket, and looking west, saw the grey clouds swirling with the lemon-yellow light in a sky that finally looked seasonal.

This morning, I walked out with a furled umbrella under an expectant pewter-coloured canopy, but it was only after my early coffee shop visit, when I turned my toes in the direction of my mother's home, that I caught the first faint sounds: the crackling hiss of drops hitting the dry leaves in the trees and the dead ones on the sidewalk.

When I walked home after setting up Demeter's breakfast, the pavement was dark wet, and starbursts of fall burst left and right of my path.

In the evening, there were pockets of puddles, not seen for months.

We'll get tired of it soon enough, even after being cheated of a proper October.  Funny how long the year has seemed, with so few months in it.