The tomato plants on my back deck are still flowering. These flowers are doomed, of course: Frost will come before they can turn into fruit, and the plants will take the hint and die.

My wife hacked down the remaining husks of the wildflowers last week. In summer, they grow six feet tall in a magnificent little patch in our front yard. Every time I see them, I am reminded of the times when my wife suddenly shouted, “PULL OVER!” as we drove along country roads or rural highways. She’d sprint out of the car and do a little quick harvesting, and the flowers would find a new home in our yard. When they dry up every year, I feel the passing of time.

This is fall, the season when once-vibrant plants get tagged and bagged. Plants wither, so the clippers and the string timmers and the wide variety of garden surgical implements all come out. This will be followed by the unmistakably sure sign of the coming winter: All of the leaves will fall from all of our ridiculous number of trees, and I’ll fill 50 or so bags with trimmings, and I’ll again wonder what I was thinking of when I agreed to buy my house.

I don’t like fall — I never have — and now that I’m older and there are too many parallels between the season and my own aging, I like fall even less. Winter is peaceful and contemplative, spring is soul-renewing, and summer is the time when everything seems possible. But everything fades in the fall.

My wife is from Florida. We travel there every couple of Thanksgivings. There is no fall in Florida — at least, not the fall to which I am accustomed — and a few days there always cheers me up for a while. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, winter awaits me in Washington when I return, and I can push past my fall funk for another year.