I knew it the second I stepped out of my building in Hamilton Heights. The air had changed. Not dramatically — New York never announces anything — but the kind of cold that slips under your collar and says, politely, you were wrong about the linen jacket.
I was very wrong about the linen jacket.
The first cold morning on the 1 train is a specific kind of humbling. I ran down the stairs at 137th Street-City College with my chai from the deli still too hot to drink, and by the time I got to the platform it had gone lukewarm in that tragic way. The downtown 1 came rattling in and everyone looked slightly betrayed. We had all underdressed together. A little community of denial.
There's a man who sells roasted peanuts near the station and today he had switched to a heavier coat overnight. That's how I actually know the seasons here. Not the calendar. The peanut man's coat.
I love the first cold morning on the 1 train though, if I'm honest. Summer in the city is loud and sticky and everyone's a little feral. But October makes everyone soft. People hold doors. Somebody gave up a seat. A woman near 96th Street was reading a battered Toni Morrison and I wanted to tell her I understood, though I didn't know what I understood.
Back home in Ahmedabad, October means Navratri — nine nights of garba, my mother's good saris coming out of their tissue paper, the whole city vibrating. Here it means I dig out one scarf and feel accomplished. The scale is different. The longing is the same.
By the time I surfaced at Christopher Street the sun had finally warmed things up, and the morning cold felt like a dream I'd half-imagined. Classic New York. It gives you a feeling and then gaslights you about it.
Tomorrow I'm wearing a real coat. Tomorrow it will probably be 70 degrees.
Tell me your city announces autumn and I'll tell you mine just whispers it on the 1 train.
Love,