I had long remembered the essay I’m about to excerpt but didn’t have it at my fingertips until I found it in a battered file folder of clippings a few weeks ago. I can’t credit it to any one author; it was an editorial in the New York Times. But I’ve thought about it often this time of year, during these golden days of just enough warmth and just enough light, days of languid loveliness like the one we have right now, temperature not even 80, humidity no more than 40, cloudless sky.

Labor Day is really the beginning of a short season all its own, an in-between time, a month of not-quite-summer, not-yet-fall. That season, whatever you call it, often feels more like the new year than the New Year itself — new books, new exhibitions, new music, new commitments, and never mind that it has all been in the planning for months.  

The city is full again and no longer in dishabille. The leaves are still green. None of the races, pennant or political, have been run to the wire just yet. Night closes in on both ends of day, and still on fair evenings the light seems to linger. The subways seem to exhale. ….

This is the time we should take off from work — only we never do — to watch summer and fall collide, to feel the sharp nights and the warm days, to walk through a garden that is ripening and dying all at once. In the country, a morning will come soon enough when all the gnats have disappeared, a sign that this short season is over.