I spotted the last seahawk of 2024, talons briefly clutching the tips of a tree above as my dogs, oblivious, sniffed the ground below.

For many, fall arrives with the equinox at 8:43 a.m. Sunday. It’s when the hours of night and day balance and pumpkin spice overwhelms.

For me, the shift begins when osprey cries are replaced in the sky above my home along the Chesapeake Bay by barking Canada geese. It means change is coming.

Some of it is political. We hold elections in November because America was agrarian at its start, and the changing land signaled a chance to change representation.

The two- or three-day elections during the end of October and the start of December made sense. Farmers harvested their crops when they were ready. That’s when they traveled to county seats like Annapolis to vote.

Fifty years later, the founding grandchildren realized that states with elections held later during harvest were more influential, sometimes canceling out early states. They moved national voting to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, giving us Election Day.

Marylanders can vote by mail nowadays, dropping off their ballots by Nov. 5, Election Day. There’s early voting to come. Other states will decide who the next president is, not because of timing but because we in Maryland are so predictably blue.

As sure as the first sweet gum and willow oak leaves are dropping on my lawn, Maryland Democrats are headed to Pennsylvania to convince our purple and red neighbors to vote more like us.

Maybe now that U.S. Rep. Andy Harris chairs the House Freedom Caucus, Maryland Republicans will start to travel for elections, too.

Polls are dropping like leaves, too. Every few days, there’s a flurry of opinions counted, measured and reported.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump appear tied, at least outside of Maryland. Increasingly, I think she’ll win by more than a razor-thin margin. She hasn’t rolled out many details of how her presidency would differ from President Joe Biden’s, partially because she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket just two months ago.

But it’s also a cynical recognition that winning may come through letting Trump be his own worst enemy. He rambles on, increasingly incoherent, arms waving while he spews hateful absurdist rants about Haitian immigrants eating pets, schools conducting transgender surgery and mass deportations.

One of my sisters is a Trump Republican. We don’t talk much about politics — I think we both try to avoid it. She posts things on social media I know to be wrong. But I figure, what harm can she do? She follows her friends and they follow her, sharing mean memes and misspelled taunts.

When I check X or Instagram or TikTok, I start feeling sick. Dark overtakes light with the passing of the autumn solstice. That’s what those channels feel like now, as the river of hate, misinformation and fake journalism overcome animal videos and pumpkin spice jokes.

This is the season when Marylanders start paying attention to elections, whether they want to or not. Our red-white, yellow-black state flag looks like a Halloween decoration this time of year, matching the colors of changing trees.

You see it on Republican Larry Hogan’s campaign bus, traveling the state in search of a path to beat Democrat Angela Alsobrooks in the race for U.S. Senate. Neither of them has struck me as a great campaigner, so far.

The former two-term governor has to win at home in Anne Arundel County and take at least one of the other big six jurisdictions to get elected. The Prince George’s County executive has to turn out big numbers in her deep-blue home county and do it again in neighboring, vote-rich Montgomery.

September polls show Alsobrooks with momentum, maybe even starting to pull away. October may tell a different story. But in the end, it is likely to be enthusiasm for Harris among Democrats — a historic figure if she loses, but a symbol of historic change if she wins — that will be the deciding factor.

Fall is more than politics. It’s about football and homecomings. It’s about school shootings.

Education Week, a nonprofit news organization, has been tracking school shootings since 2018. There have been 29 this year, eight of them in the three weeks since students returned from summer break.

The deadliest was in Georgia, where four were killed and nine others wounded. The closest was at Joppatowne High in Harford County, where a student was killed by another who brought a gun to school.

Many students bring guns to school because they fear other students with guns, most recently at a middle school in St. Mary’s County this week. Some will argue that tougher penalties for children are the answer, or that removing recent legal protections enacted to keep them from being manipulated during police questioning will resolve it.

Neither has worked before. Guns, legally owned and maintained, are a right in America. Regulating their proliferation and safe use is a shared responsibility.

If fall is the time for harvest, then school shootings are what we reap when we worship the right and ignore the responsibility.

There are no guns at the produce stand near my home. Apples have replaced the peaches; squash has pushed out the melons. I’m always shocked at how much better a honey crisp tastes when it doesn’t go through the industrial food supply chain that lands on the shelf in my local grocery store.

Over the next few weeks, more varieties will show up. Tomatoes and corn will fill their corners under the tent into October, but the smell of apples will fill your face.

With the summer heat mostly gone for the year, I’ve started baking again. I’m not even good enough to call myself a hobbyist baker. I just hunger for certain things this time of year and know enough to make it for myself. There will be an apple pie at some point, practice for Thanksgiving.

The pound cake recipe that my mother got from her immigrant grandmother will come out. I’ve never made Hutzelbrot, the German mix of dried pears, nuts and suet that holds a clue to the meaning of my last name. But I keep threatening. I bought a madeleine pan.

My daughter asked me to make pumpkin bread. I’ve done that every fall since she and her brother were little, using the recipe book that came with a stand mixer that my wife and I got when we were married.

She’ll vote in Kentucky this year. So, I mailed her three small loaves, hoping they will sweeten the red-state rhetoric. I tucked in some honey crisps, for good measure.

The osprey I spotted is long gone, on its way to South or Central America. The others in the expanded colony along the rivers in this part of the Chesapeake left before I spotted this last one of the season. It was big and beautiful, floating for a second like a black-and-white kite. He was a migrant, too, stopping here on the way from somewhere else to somewhere else.

New research shows that ospreys, which made a remarkable comeback after insecticide crushed their population, could be in trouble again. Nobody is sure, but it might be declining sources of food, whether caused by commercial menhaden fishing in Virginia or climate change.

Nobody is sure what will happen after the election either. I hope the two assassination attempts on Trump’s life aren’t a sign that more violence is coming, but I have to acknowledge it looks grim.

I hope things are better for the ospreys when they return in the spring. I hope they’re better for those of us they left behind.