It seems as if the sun is setting so much faster these days, but here it is 8:30 at night and there is still a westerly glow. Maybe it's just that we don't notice it when the skies are overcast or it's raining, compared with the clear and crisp weather we've been blessed with this week. The trees are a bit droopy, on the verge of being droppy, but they haven't started shedding yet. Most of the fields have been cleared, and there are only a few dotted with thick wheels of hay still waiting to be collected for winter storage. I haven't seen any sugarbeets by the side of the road, and no long lines of geese flying south, so it's not really autumn quite, but the feel is in the air. It's time to rotate the t-shirts in and the sweaters out and the fleece jackets. It's time to bed the garden down for those frosty mornings, and make sure the scrapers are in both cars.

For some reason, I don't mind at all. It's not just because I love autumn, love the changing colors and the way the world works so smoothly, cycling around right on schedule. It's not just because I prefer cooler temperatures, love the snap in the air and the crackle underfoot, the way the horses grow shaggier with each passing day. It's not just the urge to hibernate, getting out the winter duvet, that cozy thick warm cover that turns the bed into a nest. It's not just the way the grass silvers with tiny diamonds every morning as we depart and the kids delight in the silly faces I scrape on their car windows before removing the crackled coating so I can see to drive. And neither is it just the hope of snow, that wonderful white transformation that's like a new view on the everyday scenes we take for granted.

I know that I'll complain about the lack of sunlight, and shiver uncontrollably when I have to leave the comfort of my home. It's part and parcel of the cycle. There can't be one without the other and I wouldn't enjoy the sunshine I get half so much if it was sunny without fail every day. Its very absence is what causes me to treasure so much its presence. It's nice stuff when you can get it, those summer days.

It's a time of rest for this side of the world, a time for the earth to relax and renew. Even though it's the busiest time of the year for ME, for us; it's the promise that the earth gives each year, that winter is a temporary thing, a short and silent sleep, at the end of which the light returns, the warmth returns, and everything begins again.