I'll be canning tomatoes this afternoon, possibly making sauce to freeze, and certainly rushing around the kitchen with an end-of-summer chip on my shoulder. Suddenly the nights are cooling down. The roadside ferns are turning yellow and brown, and the maples are sporting their first red leaves. The air is still mild but it swarms with midges, and the hummingbirds have vanished, and tiny asters are foaming in the hedgerows. Late-afternoon sunshine stretches poignantly over the ball fields; strange mushrooms sprout along the forest paths. I glance at Laura Ingalls Wilder's These Happy Golden Years and read, "They were quite safe from blizzards because they did not go far from town. The wind was blowing, but not too hard, and everyone was so happy and gay for it was only twenty degrees below zero and the sun shone." Ah, yes. That's on the way, isn't it?