The Autumn Festivals Return to the Daytime, and the Elders Lead the Dancing

SEVILLE — For four months the city lived by night, inverting its clock to steal the cool hours from a summer too hot to stand under. This week, the pavement finally let go of the day, and the festivals came home to the afternoon. In the Alameda on Sunday the autumn procession filled the square in honest daylight for the first time since spring — and at its head, by unhurried common consent, walked the oldest people in the neighborhood. It has become the custom of the season turn: the elders lead, because the elders are the ones who best remember when a summer afternoon outdoors was ordinary rather than dangerous, and because surviving another one has become an achievement worth honoring in the people most at risk from it. Ninety-year-olds set the pace of the dancing, slow and triumphant, and the young fell in behind them. "We danced at night all summer because we had to," said one procession leader, ninety-three. "We dance in the daylight now because we can. At my age, a cool afternoon is a gift. I intend to open it in the street."