The leaves are changing, it's a lot like getting caught with your pants down. Indian Summer has rolled onto her capacious belly, and Nature heeds her natural rhythms while the rest of us are still paddling upriver, fronds in our hair and the last of summer still on our shoulders.

Like on Sunday, a pack of us savages in canoes, soggy sandwiches and lukewarm wine in dry bags and spiders in my hair, the engineer barking instructions from the helm, not that I can steer as I claimed I could, not that I think there is anything wrong with paddling backward, not that there is anything wrong with getting nowhere fast. If only every obstacle was a rope swing, even if the current is deceptively fast beneath that torpid, lazy surface. And cold.

The city is settling into it's due, now. All summer wrapped in fogs, and come September out she shimmies, out we spill, into the deepening evening, all without our coats on, on the beach and on the bridges, we all go purple in September, purple in prose and in nose, it's the last pink wines of the season, it's beaujolais, it's harvest, the holidays loom large, it's winter and rain and rain and some more rain, it's my engineer maybe moving far from me. But between now and then there is still what is left of September, scraps of days, a few errant tennis balls before the rushing dusk, a modicum of love, a measured bit of hope, a dollop of sadness and a dash of despair, and maybe if I am lucky a bucket of oysters when the tide is high.