New York.

"The kid in the city, big ears like a puppy" is how Bill Matthews has it, and that was me, standing in the blazing sun, squinting up the street, hailing a cab, riding twenty blocks south and wondering how in the hell I'd ended up there and then doing that. Temps in the mid-seventies, little breeze. Textbook fall. Look it up, and there it is. Not one quiet moment in forty-eight hours, not one time when you couldn't hear brakes and trains and horns and sirens and disagreement in the languages of your choice. NYC seems right on the edge of filthy, such that when the little breeze does come, if it brings a kind of fresh air, you notice. Still: In all that stench and noise and busy there's something to be much loved, the feeling that Something Is Going On Here, the kind of feeling I used to get crossing the campus at UGA, passing the library, say, or the science buildings, getting hold of the notion that Things Were Happening, and that's for sure what I felt on my Friday cab ride, looking up and out the window at building after building after building, each one holding somebody working her way towards something else, towards what's next, or what might be. Buzz at the right door and they just might let you in, just might say Hello, just might say It's good to meet you, just might, just might, just might.

We dragged that weather back with us, minus the noise and the smells, and so with not much further ado let us here at ANYLF Global Fall Headquarters welcome you to a new season. In 20 minutes, at 11:44 a.m. EDT, the sun slinks by its predetermined point and we shall all of us here squint out at the autumnal equinox. There may be a few tomatoes left out there on the vine, and the determined among you may be able to coax another crop of greens along, but we move now toward harvest, toward storing up for the winter, toward the longer nights and shorter days. Now is a time for projects. Make your lists, friends and fans of weather. Get up just a little earlier. Do the work that needs to be done.

It's fall. It's possible this whole project has been aiming itself towards this.