Musings: If It's the Last

Looking through screen, a spider web, at a backlit green mountain scene of sun shafts and westward floating clouds, and in the foreground, the papery white seed pods of African tulip trees falling like light snow as honey bees ping here and there.

We are well into September already, hurtling toward winter, days noticeably shorter, mornings markedly darker, afternoon light that distinctive deep gold. Summer, though that's technically what this still is, seemed brief this year.

But then, time seems accelerated, my sense of it is distorted.

And it's not just because I'm getting older, as I learned in a conversation with a 20-something woman who confided, “This year has flown by, at least for me, which is kind of freaky, especially if it's the last. I've really blown a lot of time if it's the last.”