There comes a day in every year when the iced tea and iced coffee run out and it never occurs to me to make more. All of a sudden, hot tea and hot coffee take their place and I find myself spending my mornings brewing coffee and my evenings boiling water and steeping tea. The transition isn’t complete quite yet, though, as I’m still content to drink water while at work. In a few weeks, though, I imagine I’ll start brewing my morning thermos of tea to pack with me to the office.

I don’t remember when it happened, but sometime in the last two weeks I drank the last cup of iced tea and, instead of turning around to make more, I thought, “I’ll make more tomorrow.” Then tomorrow came and I made hot tea instead. After all, I could always make more iced tea the next day. But each day I’ve chosen hot over cold, and yesterday I washed the container I keep the iced tea in rather more thoroughly than I normally do and put it way up on top of my cupboards so I’d stop bumping into it every time I turned around.

Fall doesn’t officially arrive until next week (September 23rd, to be precise), but in my kitchen, fall arrived sometime last week.