Editor’s note: Peggy Dover’s “Rogue Wanderer” column will return in print Oct. 12. Robert Galvin’s “Thinking Out Loud” column does not appear this week.

You know you’re approaching maturity and self-acceptance when you admit that you’re geeking out on the weather forecast.

You are sharing it with people in the grocery line or to Wade, the Spectrum tech support guy in Tennessee. Just watch the GEICO commercials. They’ll tell you it’s part of becoming your parents to which I say, so? Yeah, atmospheric rivers are exciting to me. A river in the sky? Heck, yeah. Snowfall is magical and rare around here. And yesterday, it may have hit the 90-degree mark for the final blasted time for a long, blessed stretch.

I am happy dancing. I am caressing my sweaters and fondling a new coat from Cotton Broker in Jacksonville I couldn’t resist. I put on socks.

I’m also looking ahead to a forecast that includes a coolness fit for humans and actual rain, which comes at long last just as my irrigation water becomes finicky, and the thought of dragging hoses all over Dover Acre doesn’t sound like a fun day. I’m frequently peering out the window, watching clouds roll in. I’ve got it bad. What have I got?

It’s Fall Bliss, Autumn Elation, and I hope you catch it. The autumn malady has no vaccine, but must be embraced, and is far more serious than pumpkin lattes, which I never drink.

It’s wind-whipped leaf swirls and my boots catching them underfoot. It’s ducking in out of a sudden cloudburst and hunkering down inside a barn until it blows by.

It’s thunder without a hint of fear at the probability of ensuing forest fires.

It’s breaking out the popcorn, a cozy quilt and watching “The Birds” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” while imagining once again making a ham costume like Scout’s out of chicken wire and papier mache.

It’s baking apple pies and pumpkin cookies and eating same with friends while you watch football or play Crazy Bridge, an old favorite family card game.

It’s the sound of deer crunching fallen apples in my backyard, and turkey murmurings as they stroll and scratch-scratch, finding delicious insects to gobble on their way through fallen foliage. I could go on. I think I will.

Fall began for me on Sept. 1. No matter that I haven’t switched out the tablecloths — strawberries for oak leaves — or lugged in the autumn box full of spice-colored décor and vintage stuffed scarecrows who are yearning to hang free.

Autumn is the perfect time to start a book — writing one, I mean. The days lengthen as the plot unfolds.

Fall is the sound of an announcer under the Friday night lights of an Eagle Point High School football game when I step out on the back porch and take in the sweet aroma of someone’s wood fire.

Speaking of football and Wade from Spectrum tech support, one thing I dread in any season is trying to log into my Spectrum account. But I had to prepare my phone to watch at least snippets of the Oregon-Oregon State game on Saturday, since I’ll be at work. Just don’t tell my boss, Julie Baker.

Anyway, whenever I try logging in, without fail, I find myself in the interminable circular cyber-think of passwords and security questions, the latest of which asked who my favorite pet was. With both boys keenly looking over my shoulder, I entered Oliver, one of their predecessors, reasoning it had been a while since I set this up. It failed.

I then entered every pet I’ve had for the past 20 years, including a boxelder bug I called Harve, until my number of attempts expired. So, I had to phone a friend. It took a while, even with both Wade and I putting our heads together. We successfully changed the password and security question to my sixth grade school. I should now be set for the intrastate rivalry.

Exhausted, I read a little from Amor Towle’s latest, “A Table for Two,” and napped.

Meanwhile, the anticipation of a full-blown fall is nearly as good as the actual arrival. I am preparing for a major wander across the pond to the land of my ancestors — Northern England. Adventure is afoot and autumn is, too.