Autumn arrives; the promise of heating degree-days, gourds, New England's season in the afternoon's slanting sun. Cooling days, fifties (Centigrade's decades too broad for apt description), thermostat feeling fingerprints again.

Warm-blooded, these changes should be inconsequential; equilibrium controlled with a chatter, a constricted capillary paling the fingers. Yet consciousness hefts the internal difference, finds new words, crawls out of easy summer slumber, another season lost to mindless hibernation.