the shadows ahead barely clearing the roof

Today is Labor Day, an annual holiday in honor of organized labor, but minus the creeping specter of socialism associated with May Day. Like the movement it commemorates, Labor Day has long since gotten away from its original purpose. Cut loose from its class struggle roots, it now serves as the demarcation line marking the spiritual end of the summer.

Sure, the scientists would have us believe that the season doesn't official end until the autumnal equinox on September 23, but scientists also brought us slammable yogurt and hydrogen bombs, and so should not be trusted. Astronomical calendars be damned, the seasons are as much (if not more) states of mind than hard and fast temporal divisions. When I went out onto the patio this morning, it felt like autumn, and that's what matters to me. Our cherry tree out back has already started to shed its leaves, and here and there I've noticed a few of its arboreal cousins trying to beat the rush with pre-season flashes of vermilion and orange foliage peeping through the sea of green.

It won't be that long before it turns dark before five o'clock in the evening. The cold winds will blow down from the north, carrying the of smell of wood smoke and the rattle of fallen leaves as they make the skeletal silhouettes of naked trees on the hillside sway mournfully against the violet twilight sky. The melancholy joys to be had in a New England autumn (and no more fertile ground for Halloween celebrations man be found anywhere else, I would declare) are tempered by the inescapable realization that it inevitably leads into the frost-rimed maw of the cruel beast known as the New England winter.

Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over (from Crowded House, 1986) - Split-Up Enz? Not a bad bit of melodic pop, despite being a favorite song selection for the folks in charge of the music that gets piped in to supermarkets and department stores.

Gisela & The Spirits - The Summer Is Over (from Beat In Germany - The 60s Anthology: Ruhrgebeat, 2004) - Goethe in go-go boots.

The Dead Milkmen - Labor Day (from Death Rides a Pale Cow, 1997) - Here the band milks one joke until the udders squirt blood.