The mornings should have a chill that makes a sweatshirt necessary. The trees should be beginning to trade their summer green for yellow and orange. Downtown should feel a little quieter, the air a little crisper and the Palouse should start looking like the backdrop to a different season.
But this year, it feels like fall forgot to show up.
Walking around Moscow, it is hard to believe the calendar says September. The sun still feels like summer, the afternoons remain warm and the trees seem in no hurry to change. There is a strange disconnect between what the date says and what the town feels like.
Maybe that is what makes the absence of fall so noticeable. In a place like Moscow, the seasons are part of the town’s identity. Fall is not simply a few colder weeks between summer and winter. It is football games, warm coffee, leaves blowing across sidewalks and students settling into another semester at the University of Idaho and Washington State University.
There is a rhythm to it. Summer gives way to fall. Fall gives way to winter. Everyone knows what comes next. This year, that rhythm feels delayed.
Of course, there are practical explanations. Weather does not follow a calendar, and a few warm weeks are hardly unusual. But that does not make the disappointment any less real. There is something satisfying about watching the landscape change at roughly the same time every year. When it does not, the season can feel incomplete.
The first person wears a jacket in the morning. The first yellow leaf on the sidewalk. The first evening when the temperature drops enough to make you hurry back to the car. These small changes usually arrive quietly, but together they announce that summer is finally over.
This year, Moscow seems to be waiting for that announcement.
There is also something fitting about wanting autumn in a college town. The beginning of the academic year already carries a sense of transition. New students arrive, familiar routines return and the streets become busier. Fall normally matches that feeling. It gives the beginning of the school year a visual backdrop.
Instead, September has felt like summer with a new schedule.
Still, maybe the season is simply taking its time. The leaves will change eventually. The mornings will get colder. The jackets will come out of closets, and before long, Moscow will probably be complaining about the cold instead of wishing for it.
That is the irony of seasons: We spend part of the year waiting for the next one, only to complain when it arrives.
For now, though, Moscow is stuck somewhere between summer and fall — close enough to see the season ahead, but not quite there yet.
And for a town that wears its seasons so clearly, the wait feels unusually long.
AJ Pearman can be reached at [email protected]