What shall I make of these days of orange dawns and golden dusks? The evening skies are awash in mauves and pinks, and winter sighs at my doors and windows, “I’m near, I’m very near now.”

Days of wind brushing away yet another summer’s remnants, great showers of leaves falling en masse, the fall garden a tangle of things desperate for one last stab at immortality before the cold finally wins out and silences everything. The ground is littered with acorns, pine cones, twigs. Most trees are bare now save the oaks, stubborn to the end, covetous of their leathered raiment, reluctant to part with it. There’s a gentle irony in the fact that my parsley plant is prettier now than it was all summer, perhaps because it knows its days are numbered.

Each year is the same, yet each is new. Twelve more months added to my journals, another year of learning how to see, and I am once again put to the test of naming those things I look at everyday. The things themselves never change, but they have taken on, as I have, another year of having been here in this place, of slowly being made privy to its secrets. Another birch tree falls where last year it stood upright. The landscape is the same yet changed.

And just what are these secrets? Things felt rather than known, sensed rather than seen. Sighs in the night, that fill the spaces between the owl’s hooting and the coyote’s wail. Brushings against glass made by leaves that know nothing of time and sleep and fall as thickly in darkness as in daylight. Charcoal trees against a moonlit sky, and shadow branches reaching their fingers across my bed. The wind hums its lullaby in the tops of the tall pines, and the stars twinkle to the rhythm, each wee burst of light knowing just when. The cats, enthralled by some movement of the air, raise their heads and noses to it, while all else, including the food bowl, is momentarily forgotten.

It is a time of transition, a limbo of sorts where the season becomes the place and the place the season, where there is nothing beyond this, and everything beyond it. It is an unwillingness to relinquish the moment, like a child, fighting sleep, grasping at one last moment to savor before darkness triumphs.

The walls that separate me from these woods are thin, and very little stands between me and all that is part of the great circle of life. Here I have seen the lowliest plants and crawling things, and all that comes after them, ending with me, the allegedly supreme being, the cognizant one, the one who has been blessed with the ability to choose. I feel my true place in that process here more than anywhere else. Here, I am humbled, in this world where nothing judges, deliberates, or laments, but simply is. Here, in these woods, where simply being is always more than enough.

— Rachel Lovejoy is a freelance writer living in Lyman. She can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.