Snap

I came sweating into my bowling lesson last week, changed my shoes, and starting hurling the ball. My teacher showed up and sat down to watch.

"The ball's sticking," I said. My thumb kept getting stuck in the thumbhole. "It never sticks." The only explanation was the 85-degree weather and high humidity outside, where both  my thumb and the thumbhole had recently been. I didn't want to become the kind of bowler like, say, my Dad, who swears by thumb powder, leaving piles of powder on the tables wherever he goes, getting powder all over his pants and consequently having slippery fingers when he leaves, which can be a detriment to road safety.

"Really?" my teacher said. "That's strange." I told him it had to be the unusually sticky weather. "It's supposed to drop to forty tonight," he said.

Wonderful! I thought. Forty is good. Forty is less than eighty-five. Forty is dry. I had no conception of what forty was, or how drastic the drop would be.

I left the bowling alley and everything in the parking lot was drenched. I had just missed a tropical-style rainstorm. Good!

Going from house to house, teaching music lesson after music lesson, I noticed a decided drop in temperature. Not like usual. I'd go in one house hot and come out warm. I'd go in the next cool and come out with icycles on my nose. By nine that night, I came home shivering in my short sleeves, flip-flopping in the door, my toes blue, music sheets stuck to my fingers.

"It's cold out there!" I cried to Dad, who hadn't been outside since arriving home cozy a while earlier.

"Really?"

"It's fifty-four!" I said, quoting on my car theromometer. It was the most shocking drop I could remember in recent history. Out came the fuzzy PJ's, the thick socks, the quilt. Closed went the windows. Out came the bath bubbles.

As the bathtub heated up and I grabbed my robe and a stellar piece of fiction and my Kindle (OK, maybe electronics don't belong near a tub), I forgot about the shocking snap in weather and embraced the change. Fall was here! The best, best season. Fall means hot chocolate, apple cider, the smell of decomposing leaves, snuggly sweaters. It means my students' summer brains are going from mush to magical.

Thank God for changing seasons! Just when you've had your fill of one, out pops another. What an amazing world we live in.