Strangely warm weather prevails. 28 years ago when I moved northward from southern Vermont, snow fell by the end of October and stayed until April. That April, I walked in a warm rain and wondered if I had made a mistake.

This afternoon, red clover in the fields, Johnny-jump-ups in the garden. I walked to the co-op and paid my tab and bought a loaf of bread for dinner with a crosshatch baked into its crust. At the register, we talked about the mysteries of calculus. Someone wondered if a radius calculation — r = √(A / π) — meant the center would never reach the edge of the circle, as π is an infinity? I volunteered to phone my brother or father and then steered the conversation to the surely more pressing question of color. Through the co-op’s wide windows, the autumn twilight sprinkled down in its charming way that intimated of the night’s stars yet to come, its gray scattershot with the remnants of this summer’s lingering gold leaves.

I went out and slipped through the side streets and up the hill behind the house that was once a nursery school. A woman with New York plates sat in her car at the ballfields, talking on her phone, staring up through the windshield at the turkey vultures circling over the pines where they nest.

Home again, I stood on the back porch and drank a glass of water. Dead curled leaves sprinkled the back deck.

Will the center reach the edge? Surely, a question of importance.

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” 

— Van Gogh