It is so subtle. Summer steals away and Fall arrives. It isn’t a particular day as announced by the calendar of Pope Gregory or even the movement of the planets or the moon across the lines of latitude and longitude of Earth. It is announced by an almost imperceptible change in a couple of different things. When you have spent your adult life “in the country” you notice that. Now, I don’t exactly live off-grid. I have been on the outskirts of St. John’s for about half a century. It used to be in the woods but now it is now only “almost” country. We still aren’t on a municipal water supply and there are no sidewalks, but we do have streetlights. Still, you can still see the stars except off to the east where the lights of St. John’s have taken them away. A couple of the brightest like the Pole Star you can see when there is only a crescent moon.

Anyway, back to the changing seasons and the signs that the snow will soon fly. First, the air turns cool as soon as the sun goes down. Then you notice the rain doesn’t fall straight down anymore. It isn’t a driving rain yet, but it isn’t a summer rain either. The leaves certainly haven’t all fallen from the trees but some of the apples have and the rest were picked by the tiny hands of our grandchildren. The blueberries are gone and the raspberries as well. It is the dog berries alone that stand out and that announce the season.

I am known to read the weekend Globe and Mail or The New York Times, our own The Shoreline in “high summer” in a little elementary gazebo my son and I constructed 35 years ago. In July I can still see the printed words of after about 5 a.m. Now, it’s long past 7:30 before the sun lights them up. I still bring out a coffee for that morning ritual, but I also bring a jacket these days of October. Sitting there with the paper and the cat in the silence of the morning in what is a spiritual ritual, I am reminded again at one and the same time of both the beauty of the land and the relentless idea of “time passages.”

Soon there will be the snap of higher winds. It is already the time of splitting wood and getting it stacked in the porch. It is mostly birch and black spruce now two years “off the stump” and it has moved from being trees to being logs, to being junks and to being split and moved first to the woodshed and then to the porch and finally to the wood box which used to belong to grandfather and is now across from the stove. Soon it will snow a little and then it will snow a lot. Soon the winds will whip up the valley and rattle around the roof of the house. There will be shovelling in my future and a snowblower and a roof rake and some bags of salt. This isn’t a complaint about coming winter it is instead just an observation. The cats will be indoors a lot, and I will know the direction of the rabbit runs in our garden only through their paw prints in fresh snow. There will be though a nice glow from the wood stove downstairs. Sitting by the fire there will come the ultimate questions. Will Spring come early and will we be here to receive it? It is the ultimate question. Then the eternal dance will start again. There is no answer to that other than the line from Ecclesiastes.

“There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca