Fall

"But when Fall comes, it stays a while like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since he last saw you. 

It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul. 

And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen's pasture and up on Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the golden rod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perfrom last rites."

- Stephen King

Salem's Lot