Fall was when I thought each year began. September was my birthday, it was the start of a new school year, the sticky summer was through, the air was crisp and I might even have some new clothes. Of course it was my favorite.

September was my birthday, it was the start of a new school year, the sticky summer was through, the air was crisp and I might even have some new clothes. Of course it was my favorite.

I learned to love fall when we moved to four-season Michigan in 1955, but didn’t always have it in my life. I remember little of early childhood in St. Louis except that it was very hot and we could only sleep with the help of a fan, which I knocked over and then got in trouble. And seasons in Vietnam? Hot again, and humid. The only relief was a trip to the highlands where pine trees grew and it was slightly reminiscent of the fresh air of fall of four-season Michigan. Then in East Pakistan, the choices were dry and wet seasons. The monsoons were ferocious, with widespread flooding. The slightly cooler dry season was still hot. We ate seasonal okra and pumpkin.

When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as a young adult, I discovered that the weather swung wildly depending on your micro-climate. In the western parts of the city it was cold and foggy all summer but over the eastern crest of the East Bay Hills it would swelter. The radio’s daily forecast was invariably, “Night and morning fog, clearing inland. Highs 60’s to 90’s.” If you traveled away in the summer, it was a relief to return home to the fresh air of the fog. In February, you could drive to snow many feet deep in the Sierra Nevada and then return through blooming orchards in the Central Valley. And yet, there was still a real fall in Oakland to savor, with leaves turning color by November, the nights becoming cold, and even a rare few flakes of snow drifting down in upper elevations.

In October of 1991, the Santa Ana winds ripped through the Oakland HIlls following a long drought. All the vegetation was desiccated and a spark turned into a conflagration, incinerating thousands of homes and costing 25 lives. After that, fall felt more like a time of danger. When the hot dry wind blew from the east, I recognized it as the fire wind. A dull anxiety permeated everything until the days shortened, the wind shifted, and the cool ocean air returned.

Of course, California has always had a fire ecology, so periodic fires were nothing new there or in many parts of the west. There was a large fire on Okanagan Mountain in British Columbia the year before I moved there. But in the past twenty years, as the planet has warmed, the fires have become fiercer and more frequent. Towns like Paradise, California and Lytton, BC have been completely consumed. In 2016 the entire population of 70,000 in Fort McMurray, AB was evacuated as fire raged. Smoke from Canada, Washington, Oregon, California has darkened summer skies across the continent even as far as New York City. And that is just in North America. The weather reports regularly include heat, UV index, precipitation, and smoke. There is a new season that seems determined to stay indefinitely—fire season.

I have a deep sorrow that other children may not know the seasons I grew up with, and even deeper sorrow that we humans have the knowledge but maybe not the wherewithal to change. We will know all too soon. Still, the earth remains tilted on its axis and weather will continue to change as the planet makes its yearly revolution around the sun. It still gets cooler towards the end of the year in the northern hemisphere.  Spirits can lift even as darkness increases, since it means fire season may wane.  After that, what is left of fall still brings its welcome promise of relief and a chance to start over.