Autumn Comes Two Weeks Early, As Always

By Dan Rattiner

I know that all the smartest minds in America are working on the problems we have had with the weather over the past twenty years.

However, I don't see why I shouldn't throw my two cents in. Sometimes the experts see what they want to see. Sometimes they can't see the forest for the trees. Here is what I see in this neck of the woods.

First of all, let me state my qualifications. I have lived here in the Hamptons for 52 years. I'm observant. I see this and that. So there you are.

The most disturbing thing I have seen is a change in the number of days in the summertime that the temperature rises to more than ninety degrees. It used to happen maybe two days a summer. Now it happens ten days a summer. This seems to confirm what the big boys say, which is that we've got global warming. Who knew, years ago, that when you built a factory with a big smokestack a hundred feet high to make sure that the smoke blew "away" that "away" just meant somewhere else on the planet? What were we thinking?

The most interesting change I have seen in fifty years involves the moment when summer ends and fall begins. It's really been quite a dramatic change. And yet nobody seems to have quite caught onto it, much less made any sense out of it.

All those years ago, summertime lasted all the way through Labor Day weekend. Sometimes it would extend further and we'd have what we called "Indian Summer." But mostly, right on Labor Day, you felt the first brisk winds of autumn. It corresponded most precisely to the end of the tourist season. As people drove back to the city, here came autumn. It was almost as if somebody pressed a button.

No more. For the last ten years - this has been really quite a long time - autumn has thudded in right on August 15. I know this is so because that day is my birthday. On August 14, the sun would be out, the air would be dry and hot and the temperature would be in the eighties. But the next day, there would be a chill in the air to screw up my birthday. It happened again this year. On August 15, we donned jackets. The temperature was in the low sixties. The day before, it had been in the eighties.

It's almost as if, in the middle of the third and final act of a Broadway play, they ring down the curtain. It ain't over. But it's over. Get ready to pack up. There's fall in the air.

Whether this is good or bad I do not know. On one level, the summer season is at an end early and thank goodness. On another level, the summer season is at an end and we wish it weren't so.

These last ten years, we've had to have the ten hot days of the summertime between July 1 and August 15, rather than July 1 and September 1. So it's hotter and more miserable more frequently. And cooler and nicer longer.

I have no idea why any of this is happening.

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