There’s a moment in Albuquerque when the air shifts and you know — without anyone needing to tell you — that summer is over. It’s not dramatic. There’s no storm to announce it, no hard edge to the sky. But one morning you step outside, and the heat that’s been pressing on you all summer is suddenly gone. The air has a crispness that cuts right through the haze.
This is the air that makes you breathe a little deeper.
This is the air that reminds you that fall in New Mexico is something holy.
You smell it before you see it.
Outside almost every grocery store, the roasters appear. Metal cages filled with green chile, spinning over open flame, popping and hissing until the skins blister and the air is thick with the smell of heat and earth and smoke.
That smell is the anthem of autumn here. It gets into your hair, your clothes, the fabric of your car seats. You can’t escape it, and you don’t want to. It is the smell of the harvest, the smell of a city stocking its freezers, the smell of family kitchens about to come alive.
The Chile roasters feel like a signal: time to slow down, time to gather, time to get serious about food again.
The mornings turn cool, just enough to make you pull a hoodie over your T-shirt before heading out. The sky is still impossibly blue, but the light is different — softer, angled, as if it’s trying to remind you to look up and notice it before winter comes and steals it away.
By late afternoon, the air warms just enough to make you consider peeling off that hoodie, but by sundown, you’re glad you didn’t. Nights are cold enough now that you crack the window and wake up with the chill brushing your face, pulling the heavier blankets closer around your shoulders.
This is when you start taking longer routes home just to watch the Sandias turn that watermelon shade they’re named for.
Something about this season sends me straight into the kitchen. Maybe it’s instinct — that ancient urge to prepare for the cold, to fill the house with smells that promise comfort.
I start thinking about posole, about green chile stew, about beans simmering low and slow on the stove all afternoon. About roasts that take hours, about soups that taste better the next day, about meals that make you want to eat them by the window, wrapped in a blanket, with a book you’ve been meaning to finish.
The coffee gets hotter. Pumpkin spice shows up in the morning routine, not as a gimmick but as a quiet ritual. I start debating pies — apple or pumpkin first? Maybe both. The oven feels less like an appliance and more like a hearth, a place to gather around.
Fall does something to your insides. Summer is all noise — music from car windows, late-night parties, conversations shouted over the sound of swamp coolers. Fall is quieter. It asks you to turn inward, to sit with yourself a little longer.
I find myself staying in bed just a little more, not from laziness but from gratitude — for the cool air, for the weight of the blankets, for the chance to just be still before the day starts.
And I like it.
I like the way this season invites me to slow down, to cook slower, to eat slower, to let the world grow softer around me.
Every year, this shift feels both familiar and new — like returning to a house you used to live in and finding the furniture rearranged.
The Chile roasters spin.
The blankets come out.
The hearty meals return.
The city smells like smoke and earth and promise.
I don’t know why this happens — why the season has this power over us, why we trade light linens for heavier ones, why we crave soups and pies and longer mornings.
But I like it all the same.
And maybe that’s enough: to notice the change, to mark it with food and ritual, to let the air turn you toward the kitchen, toward the table, toward yourself.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
Please like, comment, and share
Salt,Ink, & Soul 