"It was a cloudless day, of the sort San Piedro rarely saw in September," wrote David Guterson, in Snow Falling on Cedars. "This year there'd been an early string of them though - a day of deep heat but with an onshore breeze that tossed the leaves in the alders and even ripped a few loose to fall earthward.
"One minute it was silent, the next a rush of wind came up from off the water smelling of salt and seaweed and the roar of the leaves in the trees was as loud as waves breaking in on the beach." That, of course, was on the north-west coast of the US, on the islands near Seattle. Here in Ireland, September tends to lean a little more towards Keats's "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".
Either way, it is a transitionary month, often with a gentleness that has all the hallmarks of mature tranquility - or, as Longfellow described it, a time when:
With a sober gladness the old year takes up
His bright inheritance of golden fruits,
And pomp and pageant fill the splendid scene. The average September day has a maximum temperature of between 16C or 17C. Typically, on two or three days of the month, the thermometer tops 20 C, but a temperature of 25 C is very rare.
At the other end of the scale, sub-zero air temperatures are not unknown, although, as one might expect, they are also rare. And ground frost becomes more frequent as the month matures; ground temperatures below the freezing point occur, on average, on about three of September's 30 days in inland areas.
Climatologically, it is not a month remarkable for being either particularly wet or very dry. Most places experience between 100 and 150 millimetres of rainfall, with rather more in locations some distance above sea level.
The daily ration of sunshine this month, according to the record books, should be somewhere between four or five hours, a quota which would suit us very nicely, thank you, after the summer just experienced.
The windiest parts of Ireland, our west and north-west coasts, must endure an average of two to three gales in September - rather more than the summertime norm but significantly less than the usual for late autumn and winter.
So the slide into winter has begun. We return to school and work, check the central heating and, perhaps, recall despondently, despite the mediocrity of recent months, that "summer's lease hath all too short a date".