A Sudden New Season

Change is in the air this week, and on the land and waters, more abrupt than usual for late September and more sharply defined.

One of those wham-bam Canadian cold fronts, no less startling for having been forecast, swept in over the weekend on the heels of a selective thunderstorm that pretty much spared Springs and Montauk but drenched Sag Harbor and most of the hamlets south of the highway. In the wake of the rain, timed almost to the minute, came the first day of fall.

Everybody on the block, or so it seemed, built a fire Sunday night. Wood smoke, autumn's perfume, was in the air, along with a faint aroma of mothballs as sweaters came out of storage. Neighbors out for an evening walk along the ocean beach gazed in awe at a starry canopy stretching to Portugal and beyond, each cold pinpoint of light aligned in the constellations of autumn.

Summer's bounty has shriveled on the vine now. It happened overnight. Too late to pick those last, best tomatoes, the ones that were almost too red to be real. Purple eggplants and green peppers, more hot-weather paramours, are gone too, shouldered aside before you could say Jack and the Beanstalk by the bright, irreverent orange of October's emerging pumpkins.

Seldom does a new season take over so quickly or completely. At this point, an early frost would be no surprise at all; an Indian-summer interlude, on the other hand, would.

According to the calendar kept by the ancient Hebrews, a new year begins in September or October, the time of the harvest, not in barren January. Their descendants will mark the holiday next Thursday. The timing seems just about right.