Today, stepping outside, I caught that smell that only comes when the earth has been dry for days and finally gets wet. An old smell, one that takes me back to the mornings of my childhood, when summer said goodbye slowly.
I walked without direction through the neighborhood. The leaves are still green, holding tight to the branches, but the air is no longer the same. It smells of change.
I stopped in front of a wall where ivy grows. I breathed deeply, unhurried, as if to keep that smell for later.
In the afternoon someone arrived for their session carrying a tiredness that is not spoken, the kind you notice in the way they sit down. We barely talked. Sometimes the body is already telling everything.
When we finished, I opened the window and the smell of recent rain came in. I stayed there a while, doing nothing more than being.
Perhaps autumn does not arrive all at once. It arrives like this, through smell, without warning.