Every year the same argument arrives with the first cool evening, riding in on the smell of woodsmoke: is it too early for soup? And every year I am asked, as this town’s most vocal soup advocate, to defend my position. I decline. Soup season is not an argument. It is an observation.

The signs are objective. The maple on Chestnut Street has turned exactly one branch. The hardware store has moved the rakes to the front. Mrs. Petticoat has begun wearing the cardigan with the wooden buttons — the fall cardigan, not the spring one, and if you cannot tell the difference I am not sure why you are reading the opinion pages.

There are those who say sixty-eight degrees is too warm for split pea. These people are entitled to their wrongness. Temperature is a fact of the air; soup is a fact of the soul. When the light goes golden at four in the afternoon, the body knows. The body wants broth.

I have been asked whether chili is soup. I have been asked whether cereal is soup. I have been asked, by one provocateur at the farmers’ market who knew exactly what he was doing, whether a smoothie is cold soup. I said good day to him then and I say it to you now.

It is soup season. Lock in. The zucchini, God knows, is already here.