The orange and yellow vine wreath on the door reminds me it’s a bittersweet time of year.

Fall has nudged aside summer, and as usual, has left me with a melancholy that seeps into my pores like early morning mist.

It all has to do with shorter days.

Although they can be golden in autumn — glowing with colored leaves and fiery sunsets — the days begin to end too soon; and the closeness of night envelops the outdoors in darkness.

The change creeps up, from the first day of fall till Halloween and the dreaded end of daylight saving time. Minute by minute, the sun sinks into the bay more quickly until all at once, it seems, it’s 4 p.m. and almost dark.

Not yet, to be sure, but the cycle is upon us here in Maine, where folks get used to battening down the hatches before October in preparation for what’s coming by November. And they want to do it by the light of the day, which is fading, slipping, as if from a low wick.

Already, the work has begun. Seaweed, raked from the flats at low tide, blankets garden plots. Screens and storm windows have been reversed in their tracks. Apples, squash, potatoes and turnips are being harvested for storage in cool cellars. Cucumbers have been transformed into pickles; tomatoes jarred; hay baled.

Pleasure boats are being dry docked and covered with tarps. Seasonal cottages and shops have been boarded up, the furniture within draped, the shutters fastened.

The winter’s supply of wood is being stacked, row upon row, in the shed; and the hammock, as well as hummingbird feeder, has been hung from garage rafters.

The colors of goldenrod and purple phlox clash in the perennial bed, which has been clipped and covered with mulch to repair damage from the summer’s drought.

Chrysanthemums have replaced begonias in the window boxes, and pumpkins and gourds bearing “for sale” signs fill wheelbarrows along roads.

Autumn has put an end to berry picking, to sunbathing on flat, warm rocks, to the fragrance of wild roses and sunsets later than the dinner hour. It has brought the cat back inside on cool nights and has coated shrubs and trees with morning dew.

It’s a season of transition — splendid fall with its brass-colored days or wet winds that make cattails in the marshes sway and bring whitecaps to the coves.

And the transition is a short one in these Down East parts of the country where September’s song is often muffled by northwest gusts, where autumn quickly disappers into winter.

And where the days grow short.