I know that in the next two or three months I will gather up my small harvest, pickle it, freeze it, preserve it. I will turn over and fertilize the earth, so that it will be rich in the spring. I will have my major fall expedition to the town, to find the things I need for winter that I cannot provide for myself. I will sweat over my stove, stirring and pouring, and my home will be filled with the odd, bitter smell of cucumbers becoming pickles, and I will see the freezer filling with the food I have blanched and bagged for the long time ahead. The wood which I have cut throughout the spring and early summer, and of which I will cut more in the next weeks, I will carry close to the house and cover with a weighted tarpaulin, so that in the snapping winter afternoons I can easily gather in enough for the evening and the next morning, to take away the chill. I will gather up seeds and put them in bags, ready to hand out to winter birds and squirrels.

At that brief moment, perhaps just a day, when I feel that autumn has ended and that winter must begin tomorrow, I will walk. It is the day I say good-bye to the season, and I do it at the end, the beginning, of each one.

In this autumn I will begin with my daily check of the garden, or what will be left of it by then. The soil should be moist, faintly acid smelling, from its infusion of decayed compost. It should be very soft, too, loose and crumbling, and I may walk through it in my bare feet.

Then there will be the slow progress down the lane, through all the great old maples, enormous trees that must have seen generations passing by. I know very little of the history of this place; farming families mostly, I suppose, not well off for the land is not good enough for prosperity. With my own past discarded, I wanted my home to come to me the same way. When I did learn a little of its past, it was inadvertent and did not matter.

I will sit in my car at the end of the lane for a few moments, warming it up. I have to admit I keep the car locked; it is one of my key possessions, and to have it stolen, unlikely though that is on the wilderness of a back country road (but farm boys are not so unlike city boys in their desire for adventure, although the maliciousness one sees in the city is generally absent), would be serious and so I take care to keep it, and them, from harm.