In the evening after dinner I walk up Silver Road, under a moon so bright it cast shadows at my feet. It’s unseasonably warm, and when the breeze blows, there’s the sound of rain pattering. Yet the sky is cloudless, and I puzzle over this for a moment until I realize that I’m hearing the small, dry rattle of falling leaves landing atop those that have fallen before. It’s hard to believe it’s almost November. It’s hard to believe winter will ever come at all.

Dean* passes me in his big, white truck, trailing – as he always does – the unmistakable odor of marijuana smoke. Dean’s a logger, and he’s built like one, short and stout and strong, and he tells me his doctor says he’s in real good shape for a man his age, which if I had to guess, is probably a year or two on either side of 60. He used to have a dog that looked just like him (or maybe he looked just like his dog, it’s hard to say, really), but that dog got hit by a car and died and now he has another one that doesn’t look much like him at all, though I suppose it could still happen. Sometimes these things take a little time.

I turn back where the road dead ends. When it’s daylight, I can see all the way to Caspian Lake from here, where the summer people host late afternoon cocktail parties with fancy cheeses and imported olives arrayed across beautiful lacquered cutting boards. Or at least, that’s what I imagine they do. Up here, the landscape is more open, the trees are set far back from the road, and I can no longer hear the falling leaves. A dog barks; another answers. Now the moon is behind me, and my own shadow lies long across the road. It’s just the vaguest likeness, though I’ll be damned if I don’t recognize the particular slant of my shoulders, the way they always seem bent a little forward, as if they’re in some sort of hurry to see what happens next.

*Some names in this story have been changed

Really digging this song by Ritch Henderson. Maybe you’ll like it, too.