Fall arrives differently in Florida. The calendar can say summer is over all it wants, but the thermometer usually disagrees. We are still running the air conditioner, still sweating walking from the car to the house and still looking at a forecast that feels more like July than late September.
But summer is ending anyway. Football is back. School has been in session long enough that the opening-week chaos has faded. The days are getting shorter. Halloween candy has been in the stores for weeks, and somewhere behind it the Christmas decorations are probably already waiting for their turn.
The year is moving, and that is what struck me as I poured a glass this Sunday. There is something about this point in September that feels different from the beginning of the month. Labor Day is gone. College football is no longer a novelty. The school year is no longer something we are preparing for. We are in it now.
Before long, we will be into the part of the year that seems to move faster than the rest. October comes, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas. Suddenly we are looking at another January and wondering where the year went. So maybe this is a good Sunday to stop before all of that starts moving too quickly.
That is part of what I like about a Sunday pour anyway. You do not have to make a production out of it. Pick a bottle, pour a couple of ounces, sit down and see what is in the glass. Maybe it is something special. Maybe it is just an old favorite. Sometimes that is better.
The point is not really the bottle. The pour just gives you a reason to sit still for a while, and late September feels like a good time to do that. Summer always seems longer when it is ahead of us than when we are looking back at it. Then one day we realize football season is already a few weeks old and the year has quietly moved on.
A lot can happen in one season. Some of it is worth celebrating. Some of it probably could have gone better. There are things we thought would matter that turned out not to matter very much at all. Other things happened almost unnoticed at the time and ended up meaning quite a bit.
That is worth thinking about before we rush into the next stretch of the year. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a season for everything, and maybe part of faith is learning to pay attention to the one God has already given us instead of always looking ahead to the next one.
There is plenty from this summer I can be thankful for, and there are probably a few things I need to learn from too. God has a way of working through both the good stretches and the difficult ones, often in ways that are easier to see looking backward than while we are living through them. Reflection does not mean pretending every moment had some obvious lesson attached to it. Sometimes it simply means stopping long enough to notice where God was present before the calendar moves on.
Fall is coming whether Florida decides to cooperate or not. Maybe eventually we will even get a cool evening. For now, this Sunday pour feels like enough: a glass of bourbon, a football game somewhere in the background, another hot Florida evening and a little time to be thankful for the season that is ending before stepping into the one that comes next.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
