My backyard is surprisingly resistant to fall. It’s enveloped by trees in their full summer vestments as if they have one more party to attend this season. Night falls, the air cools, the green fades to black. Morning comes, green leaves replaced by yellow, floating to the frosted grass.

Or maybe not. The forecast isn’t bad. The sky this evening was very summer-like. In the northwest, there was a bank of cumulus clouds building, reaching. (“Bank” doesn’t seem right—flock? pod? murmuration?) The warm air was enough to draw the clouds’ edges upward, but it’s just not summer anymore. Rather than build and climb and flatten into a thunderhead, they just—sat there. The setting sun lit the soft peaks, turning them from white to orange, pink, then the cool slate of true night. I assume they made their way along the horizon, gave up, and scattered.

The sky has been spectacular in so many ways. Yesterday morning I stepped out of my car, the first one at the coffee shop, and looked up to see a crescent moon looking as if it held the planet Jupiter above its faintly-glowing head toward the rising sun. But coffee is sobering, and after a few scalding, bitter sips, it was just the moon, and just a planet, and they’re actually nowhere near each other. (In my heart though, Jupiter is my daughter, and I’m lifting her above my shoulders to watch the sun rise, both of us laughing.) When it’s cooler and drier, the stars are crisp, sharp—strange that something so hot can only be sharpened by the cold.

I wrote the first paragraphs above last night, then set my pen aside for a moment, but that moment became minutes became hours. A cozy bed in the cool fall air is really something, but dry air has some unpleasant tricks. I woke up in the middle of the night my throat itching, a crawling sensation deep inside my left nostril. Too tired to sit up, and too comfortable to really care, I lay there trying to ignore the discomfort, until the metallic taste of blood overwhelmed me, choked me. I sat up involuntarily, pinched my nose, and wandered downstairs to have some toast and juice to wash the raw feeling the nosebleed left in my throat.

Eventually the bleeding slowed enough (with the help of a makeshift nasal tampon) that I fell back to sleep. And dreamed. In the light of day, trying to peer back into that world all I can see through my opaque memory is shadows of the dreamworld, a feeling more than anything, a knowledge that I did, in fact dream. Sometimes in stories or movies, the dead will look back at the living world, sensing it, seeing hints of it, but not being able to make it clear. That’s dreaming for me. At the time it’s concrete, in a dream way, but later, it’s only gauzy glimpses of…something. Maybe it was something beautiful, or important, or terrifying, but now it’s not even a memory. But it’s more than just a feeling.

So there’s the dream, and there’s the knowledge that you have dreamed, neither of which is quite like a real event or like a real memory. And both are different from “sense memory”. The air tonight brings me a sense memory. It’s the air of the last days of summer up north. I close my eyes and the breeze is coming off Lake Michigan (which is of course over 150 miles away), the air cooler than the day we arrived, the hot beach days fading into nights cool enough for a sweatshirt and jeans. As the sun slips beneath the horizon toward its next stop in Wisconsin, the wind dies with the last of the day’s heat. I’m looking up now, at my little patch of woods, and I see a young cherry tree. Its leaves are bright yellow, and it could be the last of the sunlight on summer leaves, or it could be the last of the green fading from them. The illusion lasts a few minutes, until I’m sure the sun is truly gone. It’s not summer, it’s not the north. But it definitely tasted like it.

Truth be told, the smell of the lake, sand, and of chocolate fudge spread out on a marble cooling table are wonderful, but sensations of fall are as good as magic. It has to be magic, because there’s no way reality can contain the moment of reaching into a greasy paper bag, drawing out a hot donut, the scent of apples and cinnamon mingling with dried leaves crushed underfoot. It’s not dream, it’s not memory, it’s that moment when you lift your feet and fly, looking down at the ground, knowing that you can’t really fly but that this time you really are awake, you really are flying. On awakening, what’s left is joy and a touch of disappointment, but at what, you’re no longer sure.

Every lived moment becomes memory, which can be vividly reborn by sensation. Dreams live and hide somewhere in there. We are ruled by magic, if we allow it.