Oh Lord! My youngest daughter just called and told me that today is the first day of autumn. I didn’t know that, and certainly didn’t need to hear it.

I woke up to find on this first autumn morning that my brand new laptop has, due to my carelessness, eaten my half-finished Sunday column.

So today, faced with a blank screen, I am forced to entertain you with a gabble of memories. Luckily, I have new readers among my older friends, so give me a cold morning break.

Autumn has always been the saddest season of all to this old soul, even when She was visible. I seem to remember writing dozens of columns about early Autumn through the years.

She, a Maine girl who hated the heat of L.A. that started in May and hung around like boring friends and family, loved autumn and always hated that the trees in Los Angeles never really turned to all that gorgeous color stuff she grew up with — the gold and red we treasure here.

But here’s the strange part: When the loves of my life — the great and small ones, from high school to now, hit autumn — they gave me the most pain my sensitive soul could hold.

There was of course, Rosemary De Branco, she of the multiple colored cashmere sweaters and simple strand of pearls who ensnared this sensitive altar boy just a block or two this side of puberty.

I still recall how she spent many hot autumn St. Louis evenings whispering sweet nothings (between sips of Dr Pepper) in my Catholic ears in the sweet shadows of her family back porch, broken only by the light of the yellow bug lamp.

Rosemary (many of you may remember) abandoned me after high school, and while I was at Louisiana Tech, she eloped to the humid streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, with a muscled, tattooed Marine.

I learned later that they had five kids and ran a gas station convenience store.

A gentle God spared me pumping gas for the rest of my handsome life, but the deity of my errant youth wasn’t done breaking my heart, no sir. There would be endless breaking.

So here she is again.

Autumn, being a lovely, feminine temptress with her bright colors, led me to Louise, the famous bandleader’s daughter, who, after a passionate summer at a dance pavilion in the moonlight of Vermont, called me on a September evening, of course, from a payphone in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station to end our romance.

I can still hear the metallic click, like a gunshot, of the phone suddenly hanging up.

I had good times. There were Sui Han and Martha in Tokyo; Joya and Maggie, Carla and Susie in New York from the many ballet chorus lines; and acting classes and summer stock acting jobs.

And then, on a September day, the curse of autumn faded with She, the graceful lady of Maine’s Larkspur Lane. She didn’t believe in curses. You all knew her and you know the song.

Have a nice early autumn day.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.