When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.
Autumn is quintessential childhood.
This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.
Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.
– Buson
Woodbury, Vermont
