Old West Church, Calais, Vermont, 1823…. The fieldstone foundation was laid 200 years ago. I’ve been tossed a lucky bone, and I’m reading here this afternoon. Recently, I swung by with a friend to check out the acoustics and ended up sitting and watching the sunlight shift through the space. The structure remains in the 19th century with no electricity.

In an interesting way, it seems fitting to do these things in the autumn when the light in our northern realm is shifting so rapidly. On each side, the days shorten. What began in April as a sprinkling on the forest floor of hepatica and trillium and spring beauties has flourished all summer in such a lush and lovely summer. Strangers remark, “What a summer of growth!” as if to make up for these past few years of soddenness, of rain and wildfire smoke from faraway (but apparently not that faraway) places.

At the transfer station, I pull up with my hatchback crammed with that metal lidded can of cat food cans, my bins of used paper and things I no longer want in my house. I’ve been coming here for decades now. On this peach of a September afternoon, the owner and I stand outside his office, our faces up to the sunlight and a circling hawk. I mention that I’d take a month more of these days, but I don’t want to be greedy. He looks at me and says, Let’s just be greedy and want that, anyway.

Autumn is the long weeks of the growing season’s finale, the landscape gold and crimson. But within the landscape are the tiny places where we walk and live: my garden’s pink glads, the neighbor’s blooming roses, the gold flush of the butternut tree I planted as a bare root stick, seven years ago, and the girls laughed at me. The tree stretches far above our heads now, and my girls marvel. Have faith, I remind them; beauty thrives from where we least expect it….

From Carolyn Kuebler’s gorgeous essay about Vermont:

The real, long history of this place goes even further
back, to the beginning of this landform as we know it, about twelve
thousand years ago when the glaciers drew back from the land and
various species, including humans, eventually moved in.