The wood stove arrived this week.

You could tell winter was coming on, what with the edge to the nights, the cold sleep, the kerosene heater burbling its complaints as the sunset settled and the work of keeping the day’s end warm enough for comfort awakened in the dark. Over the weekend, I found myself seized by some autumnal, imperative drive, nesting like a squirrel, sticking my paws into every box I hadn’t yet opened since the move to Maine, reorganizing things, closing windows and opening space indoors.

I pulled out the sewing machine and set it aside, at the ready, in case a quilt needed stitching before being used again. I was preparing equipment on the off chance that I would need to repair a seam or a jacket lining before the temperatures dropped to the necessary lows of 30s and 40s and wool. I was already halfway through the job of getting the oil lamps filled with liquid fuel when I realized with a little start: I’m in this, committed, for the winter.

That recognition, a decision of sorts, after casting about, looking for some other spot that would be easier to manage once the snow started and the bitter cold become a fact of daily life, dawned as the arbitrary calendar end of summer seeped into the first day of autumn. The light still arrived on time and lasted long enough to feel that not quite everything had locked onto survival, not just yet.

But at the farm market, the daily stash of ears of corn was depleted; I took what I could get and hoped for the best in terms of taste and moisture lingering in the last cobs. The U-Pick apple signs sprouted along the back roads, and though the only orchards I visited were in my mind with memories of Michigan, I could feel – as though they were real and here, now – the rungs of old wooden ladders leaning on trunks and branches just out of reach. But I was busy with my own tasks. I bought the fruits of someone else’s labor and let it go at that, the Cortlands crisp as dried leaves crunching underfoot, the juice of each bite as sweet as cider.

Then, one midafternoon, in the early part of the week, the call came: The wood stove was ready for delivery.

I cleared furniture and papers out of the way, so the path to the stone bedding for the stove would be clear for the landlord’s brother to do the job unencumbered. He was hauling the stove across town to the little A-frame in the woods that is a hibernating spot and haven for me till spring. He arrived with his dad, each man in his own schedule and truck, a freshly painted black stove squatting in the back of one of the vehicles.

They hoisted it out and hauled it into the house, where a big square of stone block tile sits in the middle of the living room, to use a term loosely. It was a swift stop and a quick decision to forestall completing the job until the chimney could be cleaned. The three of us stood, staring at the body of the stymied stove as though there might actually be something to see there other than a means to casual conversation, the way people do when they know they are stopping midstream on a job that needs finishing. But waiting was preferable by far to the possibility of fire, so we left the stove untethered in the belly of the cabin and went our separate ways.

Everybody’s doing that these days, going their own way. The arrowheads of migrating geese are piercing the skies, their long arcs trailing, as though their route involved drawing the curtain of cold darkness over the hills and fields below, where we stand – the dog and I – our muzzles lifted to the honking overhead, admiring creatures who can swim in such an insubstantial element as air.

At the roadsides, the asters are holding out for a few more days or weeks, depending on the weather, reminding us that the diminishing landscape will be vacant only for a time. Soon everything growing will have given up, surrendering to the new season and, I expect, to snow – something frozen to fill the suspended time and empty space.

Nothing in nature remains unattended for long, whether substitution comes in the form of a season changing or depleted leaves descending, making room for the buds to break next spring. The little larcenies of downed limbs from a roadside-clearing project are a bit of talk around town, as people not preoccupied with a day’s employment work their way along the opened pavement, culling firewood in the wake of the power company’s crews.

We are all gathering in the gear we need to outlast the winter. Bought, stolen or saved, these necessities – heat, light, the promise of spring – are what it means to endure the tidal dark, the severe shoreline, the risk imbedded in the rocky coast. But come closer; for now, there’s the fire within.

North Cairn can be reached at 791-6325 or at:

ncairn@pressherald.com