September 3

Here the autumn sweeps in again in its dappled vermilions & russets & blazing golds, & the crisp light sieving the world in fine shadow. The frosts beginning in the morning, temperatures hovering around freezing & rising only slow & languid through the waning daylight. & autumn here absurdly beautiful. I walk slack-jawed & awed by it. Yesterday, we walked towards Carlo Ridge, forgetting moose hunting season began on the first. The trail splays out, ten feet wide, rutted with horseshoe prints indented where the mud gives & pulls their legs down. We turned & headed back to what may be the most plentiful patch of blueberries I’ve found. The dogs, after observing us picking, have taken to berry eating, & slowly, methodically, plod bush to bush nibbling carefully to avoid the dun leaves. Willa’s paws show streaks of stained purple. Moose, I think, may well have swiftly developed a keen addiction, given his particular vigor & voracity among the berries. But there is something to it, pausing, kneeling down in that quiet, hearing the soft sound of the dogs leisurely in their eating, smelling the sweetness of the loam & tundra. Raise your eye from that scene & wonder how ever you could leave it. I am tendriling into the ground here.

& otherwise, it’s the thought of mushing now occupies the bulk of my thinking. I look for snowclouds, I hope for cold. I spend more time with the dogs in the yard, talk to them about the winter, about my thrill at the thought of it. We’re all ready for the shift, for that blanketing quiet to fall over us, for summer’s dizzying pace to slow & abruptly halt. I am worn down, decidedly, & I am turning my eye to the Labor Day flush, when the boards go up over the windows & the buses disappear & with them the hordes of visitors. & then it’s just the wide open empty park, & the snow, & the sound of the wind, & the long & lovely yawn of winter.