Pop quiz: On what day would you typically discover your furnace isn’t working? That’s right – the day summer has retreated, the windows are no longer wide open in every room of the house, and you need to simply take the chill out of the air.

Spouse and I spent a lovely 24 hours escaping the doldrums of home improvement and paying bills last weekend with an overnight trip to Freeport. I know that’s not really considered a “trip” when you’re from a town 45 minutes away, but that’s as good as it gets these days. When we were on our mini-getaway the temperature took a downward turn.

It was while we enjoyed dinner Friday evening that I remembered we left several windows open at home. The temperature had changed as quickly as flipping the pages of a book on Friday. In the course of a day, I had gone from wearing short sleeve shirts and not even a sweater, to a long-sleeved shirt and one of the three jackets I had packed.

On Saturday, we wandered around Freeport people watching, candle sniffing and blending in with the many tourists who waited until after the summer rush to get their Maine on. The sun shone most of the day, allowing us to leave our jackets behind, but eventually the winds shifted enough to push us back into more apparel.

Toward evening, we returned home to a cooled down house that needed a touch of heat to make it comfortable. The furnace, however, decided it hadn’t been given enough attention for the past several months. Spouse put a call in to the furnace guy. He will see us in mid-October.

Second pop quiz: What happens when you wait until you need the furnace before you call for service? Yup, you’re going to need a space heater. We should be ashamed of ourselves, really. When we were dating, Spouse’s dad was the furnace guy – the one who tried to schedule furnace cleanings all summer, received calls at all hours of the day and night in the winter months from folks who had said no thank you, and spent much of November through February steeped in soot. He also taught his children to always get their furnace cleaned and maintained every August instead of waiting until The Big Chill like everyone else does … like we did.

I can guarantee more than one reader will think I’m unworthy of the title of Mainer or even New Englander because we’ve already taken the air conditioners out of the windows and reached for the thermostat. It’s not like I need it to be balmy in the house. We keep it at a nice even temp of 80 F. Kidding – 68 F is our comfort zone, and it wasn’t much lower than that when we got home on Saturday. But you know how being out on a decently warm, sunny day skews your internal temperature chart. It’s like sitting outside on a fall evening around a rolling pit-fire roasting marshmallows – once you’re inside, you want your warm jammies on.

Nothing surprises me about the weather in Maine or our reaction to it. If this had been spring, 60 degrees would be downright balmy. We’d break the shorts and the shades out. Put those temps at the other end of summer and suddenly we’re mumbling the “s” word (snow, people), washing the scarves and mittens and testing the snow blowers.

Now here we are waiting for the furnace guy to make an appearance, with two weeks to go as you read this. The space heater has been uncovered and set up in the living room for those just-in-case chilly evenings. There are two blankets on each sofa and I’ve begun bribing the cats to stay in my lap while watching television (as if they need a reason).

Two weeks can be a game changer during a Maine autumn. The weather can be very fickle in that stretch of time. So while we wait for the recovery of our main heat source, I guess I’ll just cozy up to the space heater and microwave some s’mores.

— Janine Talbot is adjusting to her empty nest in southern Maine with her spouse of 32 years and two and a half cats. She can be reached at janinevtalbot@gmail.com.