Asters I planted in my garden, withstanding first frosts.

More indicative, perhaps, would be this:

Darkness lies deeply on each end of the day, cats rising hours before dawn to eat, myself to weld that fork and open my laptop. Afternoons wind down into early darkness. A friend and I walk through spits of rain, wander along Main Street, jammed with locals and leaf peepers, negotiate the two empty stools at a long bar, where she drinks beer and I drink club soda, eating the pip of lemons.

What does time matter? It might be six or ten, maybe nearing midnight. Night presses against the wide windows, as if hungry.

Later, walking home, the air touches my face with its scents of diesel and rotting leaves, woodsmoke. Every year, this pause. The need to gather coats, who needs new boots? and where are the mittens?, the price of snow tires, the aligning of ash buckets, the necessity of socks. All that long winter I was sick, I couldn’t navigate the porch steps and the ice by myself, darkness relegated to my windows. Only in those rushing nighttime drives to Dartmouth Hitchcock did I know the constellations arced overhead, Ursa Major, the gleaming Pleiades, the scrap of cold on my lips. How I missed this.

And a favorite Maggie Smith poem:

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs chasing prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.