The short side of the year

By late October the light has gone short. The sun comes up later, quits earlier, and never climbs as high as it did in July. What's left is a narrow lit middle to the day: a few hours of low gold that arrive late and leave in a hurry. The year has started rationing the one thing we named ourselves after.

Most of us don't notice the exact day it turns. We notice the symptoms. Leaving somewhere in the dark that used to be bright. The afternoon that feels like evening by four. A slant of light across the floor at three o'clock that wasn't there a month ago, longer and warmer and somehow already on its way out. In a week or so the clocks go back, and the ration gets smaller still.

It's not just less light, it's different light

The thing about autumn light is that it changes character, not only quantity. The sun sits lower, so it comes at everything sideways. Shadows run long all day instead of pooling under things at noon. The color warms up, that particular gold that photographers chase and the rest of us half-notice on the drive home. It rakes across a brick wall or the side of a face and makes it look considered, like someone lit it on purpose.

Summer light is generous and a little careless. It's everywhere, all day, so you stop seeing it. Autumn light is scarce and specific, and scarcity makes you look. There's less of it, and what there is, is better.

The indoor half of the year

The trouble is that the lit middle of the day lines up almost exactly with the hours most of us spend inside. The good light shows up around the time we sit down at a desk, and it's gone by the time we get up. You can go days in late autumn only seeing daylight through glass, which is a strange thing to do with the brightest hours of a short day.

And there's an instinct this time of year to treat the dark half as something to wait out. To draw the curtains, turn up the lamps, and ride it to spring like a long flight you'd rather sleep through. It's understandable. It also means trading away the one stretch of the day the season actually hands you.

Going out to meet it

The sun is in our name, and we've said before that we respect it rather than fear it or chase it. In a season that rations the light, respecting it mostly looks like going outside while there's some. Not for a number. Not to extract a result by Friday. Just to be in the lit middle of the day for a few minutes of it: a coat, in October, for no audience, standing in a patch of low sun or walking the long way somewhere with nothing to show for it afterward.

It's a small thing and it's supposed to be. The light doesn't ask much. It's there for a few hours, lower and briefer than it was, and then it isn't. Meeting it is less a practice than a habit of noticing, the kind that survives because it costs nothing and asks for no equipment and can't really be done wrong.

The short side of the year is the part people apologize for. We'd rather not. The light we get now is the good kind, low and gold and brief, and brief is most of what makes it worth looking at. It comes back around in the spring, taller and longer and easier to ignore. This version, the rationed one, is only here for a little while. That seems like reason enough to go stand in it.

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Tan Girl writes about lifestyle, skin, recovery, and the long game. Nothing here is medical advice.