It was 48 degrees when we entered the forest this morning. Shorts, gloves, hooded fleece top, socks, and hiking shoes. There was a crisp autumn bite in the air. Should have worn a hat.

Samwise picked up the scent of a bear early on and put his pink nose to the task. Emily so wanted to keep up with his zig-zagging, but was held back by her leash. In his frantic tracing back and forth, Sam spooked a family of grouse, which frightened him equally.

He jumped back with a start! Mother and father rustled off in opposite directions with a rousing commotion, leaving a youngster behind crying out. The wail sliced into my heart, and I apologized.

We hurried away, with Samwise’s pink snout back to the ground. That prodigious probiscus led us to a grove of crab apple trees where the bear had feasted, and left a large pile of scat.

In the past, Emily would have sampled it, but thankfully she’s left her shit-eating ways behind. Ah, if only all of us could move on from our bad habits.

Yesterday, I took the air conditioner out of the window and closeted it away. A rite of passage that happened earlier this year. And when we returned from our walk this morning, a pot of my new favorite chili became my focus. The recipe comes from the good folks at Mastering Diabetes. (I choose to go with fire roasted corn. The Trader Joe’s version is fabulous, but you can also throw frozen corn on a hot skillet. Works just as well.)

Meanwhile, Vivaldi’s Autumn from his Four Seasons played, and I chopped and diced to the notes while at the kitchen counter. I also washed and stabbed two sweet potatoes and began baking them. The chili goes well over anything, butbthere’s something in the chilly air this morning that calls for sweet potatoes.

While cooking, and looking out the window at the rush of none-stop tourist traffic rumbling by, I thought back to the quiet of the woodland earlier. After we had startled the grouse and left behind all traces of the black bear. While traipsing among the wood nymphs and elves in the dark forest, we were serenaded by the call of a flock of Canada geese passing overhead. All three of our heads craned toward the treetops. We were draped in that sweet shared wonder soul friends (actually, I prefer the Gaelic term anam cara) find in nature.

It was that familiar harsh and exciting song that first led me to Mary Oliver. Her Wild Geese took hold of me when I needed it. She urges the reader to step back from society’s silly rote ways in order to reclaim a childhood sense of wonder.

I had recently given up my job as a chronicler of Newburyport’s characters, sold the Undertoad, dropped out of the mayor’s race, and followed Atticus to the tranquility and the wild of the mountains. I was broken, worn down, tired of the busy-ness of an ego-driven world. I longed to simplify our lives.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Lordy! Is it any wonder why her poem shook me then, and why the three of us stopped and gaped at the flock’s half-hidden flight through the overstory this morning?

Never has the sacrament of communion nourished my soul more.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely…”

Amen—a hundred times over.

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I am well aware that many of you out west are suffering record heat this week. I hope today’s post offers you a glimpse of autumn cool, and some refreshment in this feverish world.

Also for our western friends, don’t be surprised to see us joining you for a spell this winter. Adventure is calling, and we long to go where people are not. January in the high desert, or in the snow amid the stately Ponderosa Pines, knowing rattlesnakes are asleep, but being on the lookout for roving wild javelinas.

Yes, adventure awaits, and the coronavirus will change the way we travel. But we are well-suited to it, since we make a practice out of avoiding folks. Which is one of the reasons we’re leaving the Mount Washington Valley at the beginning of ski season.

On top of the ski crowds, in winter the number of trails we can visit without leash has always been limited, but that’s even more the case due to the influx of the wealthy COVID-19 migrants from southern New England. The places we roam freely have been cut by complaints of dogs being off-leash in places they’ve always been off-leash. Alas, gentrification has come to the mountains of New Hampshire. Add those restrictions to the snow depth on mountain trails and all I desire is to find a place to walk with ease in the wild. (While keeping an eye for javelina, of course.