Fall is here, and winter coming. It has been years now since the dark, dark winter, but I still feel some trepidation, a worried stirring in my soul. Everything is different now I know, an inward turning natural and fine I know, a quieting fine, and spring will come again, I know. Fall is here, and winter coming. The wind has changed these past few weeks, the air and light have changed. There has been frost up in the mountains, though none yet in our lake-warm valley. I am hoping, as always, for rain.

Fall is here, and winter coming. Stock is simmering on the stove, and we have eaten little but soup - butternut squash, Vietnamese pho, chicken - for the past week. J makes sourdough each Saturday, this last time with rye and caraway. We're planning a giant pickle batch for next weekend to last us the winter, along with applesauce from two bushels that wait patiently in a bin on the kitchen floor.

It is getting darker. When he leaves in the early morning the light shines but weakly around the shade. I wake in the middle of the night with poems in my head, words in my head, but now it is too cold to get out of bed and I don't want to turn on the lamp and wake him. Fall is here, and winter coming. The hillsides are made of stained glass, the trails slick with fallen shards. I stare and them and think of all the water, all the air, all the pulsing trunks that made them, only to be scattered and trampled. But these leaves will mostly be soil by spring, and will mostly be leaves again. The squirrels gorge on acorns, the foxes gorge on squirrels. Gunshots echo across the beaver pond as we hike, and he takes off his green-brown hat.

The wind comes. Fall is here, and winter coming.

Trees
fan the wind as they sway.
Bushes help.
Your heart fills up.

My heart fills up. Just now the sun fell behind a cloud, and as always, I am hoping for rain. Winter's coming.