Woke up this morning, not early, 7 o’clock. Whaaat? It’s still dark. Not a glimmer of dawn. But I happen to know the sun was supposed to rise here at 6:49. Simple solution – go back to sleep.

At 8:30, it is just very gloomy, rain is pelting down, trees are tossing their heads and the temperature is falling down past 15C/60F. At least the papers have arrived and their weather maps show rain from Iqaluit to Maimi. Even Houston and El Paso are getting wet.

Yesterday, Friday, it was hot and humid with sun burning down. But the traffic, which had been its usual summer-lite on Wednesday, was back to its non-summer impossible. I hit a detour 5 minutes from home that held me back 15 minutes and even my usual “deke-around” routes had huge trucks barrelling toward me on narrow residential streets.

I was late for my tai chi class. So were ten others. We sat on the benches changing our shoes.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” the woman across from me said. I only just kept myself from falling on her shoulder in a grieving embrace.

Then wouldn’t you know it, on the way home, Jim Morrison “Summer’s Almost Gone”, going on in atonal fashion about having been calmly unaware with gold burned into our hair, “Where will we be/when summer’s almost gone?”

Easy answer, Jim, sitting here, staring out at the rain and the maple leaves turning orange from the edges in before our very eyes.

We are moving on in our grief in my town at least. Mostly, we have stopped talking about it. Some of us have buried ourselves in a relentless round of movie-going or celebrity stalking attendant on our film festival. (That would be TIFF.) There are many more flyers in today’s papers and from the looks of them, others are going to hit the stores to buy crazily- patterned shoes and clothes. One caption cries, “Let loose the houndstooth”. Or look – what a nice dining room table and all the gewgaws to set it up for a harvest dinner party. I do have Perception and World Without End waiting on the TIVO.

Here in TO, we get to enjoy a lot of indoor time once summer ends, so why not get the rugs cleaned and set up the new filing system. That should be fun!

Jim, how can you people in California even pretend that you have winter?