I think there are two stages to autumn in the Northeast.

The first comes in late September and early October when the trees are changing and the sun shines and the days are still pretty warm and everything is bright. The second comes right about now, after we turn the clocks back and the leaves turn brown and fall of the trees in the cold wind and swirl around in the streets and it gets dark at 5 p.m.

The first autumn invites you outside, pulls at you with promises of crisp air and comfortable days without the threat of heatstroke or standing next to someone on a crowded subway who hasn't quite mastered the art of applying deodorant.

The second autumn encourages indoor activities, quiet nights huddled on the couch beneath a blanket or a friend, candles in the corner flicking shadows on the walls. It calls for dinner parties and warm cocktails and four friends or fourteen around the table.

I tend to enjoy both seasons within the season. The second autumn comes after months of wanting to maximize the warm outdoor weather, when a couple of quiet weekends without feeling a need to hit the beach or the hiking trails is something of a break, a vacation even, from life.

It is now � the baseball season complete, the clocks adjusted � when I begin to think about the coming holidays, the end of the year, the fact that I don't have a fireplace.

So it's not a perfect fantasy.

October 26, 2003

From One Time to Another

The sun came up an hour early this morning � if you remembered to set your clocks back last night, that is. That sudden flush of morning light is autumn's little dividend, and just at a time of year when it's been seeming harder and harder to get up. Naturally, what we'll notice most this evening � this afternoon � is the early onset of darkness, the certain herald of winter. If you can just stay focused on that extra morning light � a bright sky by 6 � it almost eases the trauma of sunset by 5.

The jump backward in fall and forward in spring exposes, for a day or two, the convention of time itself. Today we resume what might be called natural time � canceling the adjustment we make for summer. And yet winter's time is really no more natural than daylight saving time. Timekeeping is an agreement among humans.

And yet the thought that this is natural time somehow will not go away. It makes one wonder what it would be like to pass through summer without observing daylight saving time. On the summer solstice, the sun would stride broadly over the horizon just after 4 in the morning and go down, husbanding the day, about 7:30.

Few of us are really ready for that. It's no wonder we feel relieved when daylight saving time resumes in April. It may be that we're just a procrastinating species, unable to rouse ourselves to a summer morning that begins at 4. Either way, we're sliding into the time of year when there is barely enough day to go around, a time when we learn to savor darkness all over again.

Copyright 2003�The New York Times Company