The signs of the changing season come on slowly and subtly in late August, but as soon as September comes, the tempo picks up a bit. There is now a decidedly reddish cast on a few maples, and occasionally a morning cool that sends me digging in the closet for jeans that have been sitting unused for months….

In Boston, however, the change of season is dramatic as 350,000-college students return. And nowhere is there presence more obvious that at Target on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. With a spectacular lack of good planning on my part, I found myself at the Watertown Target at 5:00pm as busloads, and I really do mean busloads, of college freshman were being disgorged to purchase dorm room supplies. Like locusts, they swarmed through the home furnishing/dorm room section until the shelves were bare.

My daughter, the marketing guru, told me that the Somerville Target does more business on Labor Day weekend than during the Christmas holiday season. It is one thing to read the annual spate of articles in the Boston Globe about the return of the students, and quite another to get up close and personal to this massive economic engine on a buying frenzy.

It was good to return to the boonies where autumn continues to make its presence felt in smaller steps. Just yesterday morning I saw the first blush of autumn orange in the salt marsh grass.