Tomorrow back East you’ll start to see a snail-trail exodus of vehicles heading back from a long weekend on the Cape, or the Hamptons, or the Jersey shore, or any number of lakes, mountains and beaches. For some, the arrival of Labor Day means the end of summer, back to school, and the start of preparations for fall and the dark that comes shortly thereafter. Already you can see the progression of the seasons in the now-obvious shortening of days, the softer angle of the sun, and the shadows that already begin to lengthen shortly after noontime. The meterological calendar still says it’s summer, but for most people, the onset of September means that fall has arrived.

Not so around here.

Here in the Valley of the Sun, we just had yet another day of plus-110 temperatures, and you can tell that everyone is starting to get weary of it. While in certain places the monsson season has brought violent storms and soaking rains, here in Gilbert it’s been just more of the same, with a little more blowing dust than normal.

And you’d be hard pressed to find any indication of a chnage of season around here. Sure, the days are getting shorter, but the days remain brutally hot. I’ve stopped counting how many days we’ve had a heat advisory in effect. Trying to do any kind of yard work is an effort in futility. And the blazing pavement beneath bare feet and the touch of anything dark or metal outside feels as much like mid-June as it does September. My inner clock says that it’s time to start thinking about getting the sweaters and long pants out, and looking for the signs of a change in the seasons. But not out here.

Out here, the heat of summer still rages and we’ve got another month of plus-100 days before the weather patterns change.

They don’t live in Arizona for the summers, that’s for sure.