When Fall comes

When Fall Comes
excerpt from 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Chapter Six, The Lot (II)
1975

But when Fall comes, kicking Summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of the places he has seen and things he has done since last he saw you.

It stays on through October and in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day and is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper in your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.