The first day of fall slipped past me a couple of days ago. When does the season truly begin? When I turn on the heat.

Autumn started at 2:06 this morning. Now I bid summer a warm adieu.

Thanks for the memories. In living color.

Credit: Catherine Hamrick, Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Duke University

Treat yourself to a leisurely stroll any day of the year from 8 a.m. to dusk. There is a lot of ground to cover in this 55-acre public botanic garden, so locals can indulge in a trek every season. The same but new!

Early this morning, 850 miles away in Alabama, my sister told me, “We are with Dad. He is ready to go see Nome [Mom]. He loves you.”

Today we document our lives in hundreds of digital images and store them in a “cloud.”  Like the wonder of the telegraph in the 1800s, we send words, billions every second, via a void called the Internet and instruments cleverly branded Android and iPhone.

Ah, branding. As a savvy New York writer/agent told me at a recent book conference, “You must become a brand, or you won’t make it.” To which I retorted, “I am a person, not a brand.”

Ironic. Perhaps hypocritical: I “storytell” things and people as brands for a buck—in a staccato burst.

Dad never “branded” himself. He was a person in full.

The brain is beautiful mystery. Streaming images run in and out of our heads, faster than the…