September's tail

When I arrived here, the days were hot and so were the nights; now, finally, the weather is beginning to turn. Rhyming Syrian proverbs put it this way:

Ab al-lahaab (August is aflame).
Aylool danabo mablool (September’s tail is wet).

Yesterday, the rain came three days late. It was hardly a storm and the sun emerged after half an hour, but it began to clean a summer’s worth of dust off the city and signaled the changing seasons. The days are still warm, but the nights are cool; last night the coolest yet.