Late Summer morning

Late summer, almost a month before Summer turns to Autumn and yet I can feel its approach.
Maybe it's the sounds, above the noise of a pneumatic drill I can hear someone practising the trumpet, I have decided that this is in anticipation of the return to school.

In England, I was always aware of a shift in the light towards the end of August, the deep orange Montbretia and Crocosmia would be coming to the end of their flowering and the light would alter subtly. But I haven't noticed that here. Not yet.
The sun sets earlier for sure, and should you be out around ten, it is dark instead of light-streaked.

The City of Richmond BC has a population of about 200,000 fewer than Portsmouth. The City of Vancouver has a population almost three times that of Portsmouth spread out over 114.67 square kilometers. And yet Portsmouth occupies just a few square miles, I used to cycle from the southernmost point to the north end of the North End and that was just under 3½ miles. I passed 8 pubs just on my favoured route.

And so England can certainly be a smellier country, more closely packed, more assaults on the nose.
When I cycled in Portsmouth, you would go through patches of different smells. In the morning, if it had rained, there was a particular smell to the damp pavement. Then there were the bakery smells of bread and pastries and drifts of flower scents.
In the evening, Chinese food, Indian food, burgers, comforting cooking smells, maybe barbecues in the summer months.
I found Portsmouth as a city, to be given to small areas of mustiness when I stood still, when I cycled, it didn't matter. In town Lynx aftershave (called 'Axe' here), women's perfumes, cheap, expensive, floating past you.
Fish to buy, freshly caught.
In London, packed into tube trains, more personal smells, people's deodorants, oral mintiness or coffee. Occasionally an unwashed traveller. Coming back, beeriness or other alcohol.
In the London Dungeon there is an area depicting plague-ridden London, overpowering fart-gas pumped in, unpleasant cheesiness rather than the sickly, cloying smell you imagine it to be.

As Autumn approaches, the smells change, in town, the sweetness of candy-floss and ice-cream give way to the potatoey smell of roast chestnuts and of....baked potatoes. In shops, the florals give way to spices, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, Christmas spices.
In the gardens and balconies in both countries, tomatoes reaching ripeness, the leaves giving off a strong, distinctive fragrance as you brush against them. Perhaps fragrance is the wrong word.

Richmond is home to Vancouver airport, and yet to the South there is farmland, so sometimes we can smell the fruity corruption of manure. The signs of late summer here are fields of vegetables ready for harvesting, and later, when October comes, big, orange pumpkins, lying on the surface as though someone had thrown them there and left them.

Perhaps it isn't the light or the sounds or the smells, but simply the body's awareness of the rhythm of the year, the summer comes gently to an end. Here, no August thunderstorms to freshen the air, just an end to the blueberries to signal summer's decline.