it has been harder, this year, for my brain to take daylight savings. i love that initial "extra" hour, and then, once the transition's happened, i can't believe noon looks and is so much later. an hour, only, i know, but so, so much later.

when i lived in wyoming, a favorite friend yearly anticipated fall-back and the earlier dusk that allowed her to begin nesting at four, get a hot, smelly meal going, start a drink and finish it and start another to finish. we navigated several years of seasons in laramie together, and what i remember most are the dark nights spent at her house while snow fell or sat in its collection or the thermometer dove deep through the negatives. she'd make something thick and garlicky and we'd drink wine and watch TV and if we were lucky eat cake at the end and sit and be warm. happy. satisfied. tucked.

i've never lived outside a town or city before, clear of the blanketing light of dense population. here, darkness is dark. i sit at the window and all there is to see is me, reflected back, maybe the neighbor's dim porch light if the night is clear. dark is quiet is river and frogs, a rare car or truck taking the road, thumping the bridge.

yesterday we put away bird netting. we'd relieved the vines of it but needed still to tie incrementally and store for next year. next year's beauty, its sugars and bunches and long summer light. we began dry and finished wet but for several afternoon hours it was warm if also mutely lit, misty hilled, damp furry air. work here isn't work amid moss and quail and salamanders, those frogs again, that river. amanda and nola and patrick and nathan. bodhi the dog. anne the friend. the cat luna sneaking out the upstairs door. caterpillars and black and orange creepers and gall wasp globes and dirt. rain and gray and blue and heat and new plants and established roots and ideas, always ideas. there's a pregnancy here, an urgency that's kind enough to plant us in moments.

we arrived here in august. it's already november. it's only november. we know a new two, we see our two old twos, a small girl calls us by name, she sings for our dog and cat and sees a hat and knows whose head it owns. the nights come quickly, angling off hillsides and sealing the valley. we heat our kitchen colored summer's melon flesh with dinner, we wake to grapevines shrouded, deer out the windows, bats swooping blindly, coyotes' yips of kills or love or weeping. in a time of such instability we are surrounded by steadiness - friendship, growth, family, love. if we understand little else we can be assured the grapes will come back, their leaves unrolling first, next their nub fruits, sweetness steamrolling, bankside bramble becoming berries of a black to stain us with summertime, our motion always toward.