OCTOBER EVENING

I’ve stepped outside to do some moon gazing. The still air smells of fallen leaves and wood smoke. It’s mid October and many of the trees are bare-limbed and stark against the twilight sky. I’d prefer the foliage would hang on for a longer time in their Indian Summer dress, that autumn was not so short-lived. Once stimulated by the colors of fall, I become greedy for more.

Earlier in the day a grouse was drumming in the woods beyond the back door--the dominant one perched on his log letting the young guys from the springtime brood know who’s boss. This evening, from the pines nearby, an owl hoots and is answered by another farther up the hillside. It’s eerily quiet as I stand on the patio and listen to their conversation. They sit their perches, harbingers of the nighttime harvesting of prey. If I were a field mouse, I’d fear for my life. The silent stalkers are about the woods. One moonlit night hiking a snowy woods path through a stand of pines, a large owl passed over my head. I first noticed its fleeting shadow cross the snow and looked up to see outstretched wings, so close yet so silent gliding among the branches. Had I been a smaller mammal, it would have been over before I even saw the shadow. You appreciate the fact that in this neck of the woods, at least, you’re high atop the food chain.

The moon sits bright on a tree top and the scene encourages premature thoughts of the Yule season: the Christmas tree has been decorated and suddenly you feel the urge to sing a carol or two. Well, not quite. Halloween is yet to come. My thoughts progress to images of hideous witches in black capes and ghoulish beings that lurk in dark places; things that used to scare me as a kid with an all-too-vivid imagination. Maturity (old age) diminishes those silly fears, I think, only to have them replaced by real life ogres such as the tax man, zealots and the Grim Reaper. Yet I enjoy the heightened sense of the ominous this time of the year. It’s a childlike stimulation when the rewards gleaned are no longer in a trick-or-treat bag, but in the re-knowing of another season.

I step off the patio and round the corner of the barn. WHOOSH! A deer snorts from beneath the apple tree grown wild near the foundation, and the adrenaline rush I get is like a jolt of electricity. I see dark phantoms leaping in all directions and hear their hooves thudding upon the ground, their white tails defined by the moonlight. They retreat to the field across the way, blowing like a pod of surfacing whales. I wonder to myself, How much longer can this well-used heart go from beating normally one moment to full acceleration the next? I’m tempted to check my feet to be sure I haven’t jumped out of my shoes. I go over to the tree and pick up a fallen apple. It’s crisp and tart. An animal shrieks and there is the noise of leaves rustling in the woods.