I was toying with a might-have-been that hadn’t happened yet but wasn’t unreal for not happening and might still happen, though I feared it never would and sometimes wished it wouldn’t happen just yet.

– André Aciman, Literary Hub (lithub.com)

Autumn is my favorite time of the year. It has been throughout my life, even when I was a child and it meant the end of summer vacation. I like the seasonal transition: the cooler, less humid weather; the colorful red maples, rusty oaks, peachy beeches, and my favorite golden tamaracks; the holidays, Halloween and Thanksgiving, then Christmas and the new year. An end to one season is the beginning of another, and I consider fall and spring to be real beginnings, whereas winter and summer are just extreme continuations. I grow weary of the extremes.

Beginnings. As a child and later as a professor I loved the start of school when everything was fresh. As a student I was amazed that the complex math problems at the end of the text would become part of my world of knowledge. I read my English books before the first week of classes had ended. I am drawn to the idea – the plan, the theory – before it is complicated by reality. Although admittedly, sometimes the weird tangents that take a semester off course are equally educational and fascinating.

Autumn’s appeal includes its tinge of melancholy. I trust endings more than beginnings, I guess, and although each ending is a beginning, the overlap of the two appeals to me. This autumn, as my Adirondack family dispersed to their “real” lives, I consciously valued each remaining moment. Icy mornings on the misty lake where ducks, geese, and loons gathered to migrate south. Brilliant sunrises. The first snowfall. This transitional time of year is captured by Joni Mitchell’s lyrics in “Barangrill”: “And you want to get moving, and you want to stay still.” Or as the essayist André Aciman explains, you can miss a place while still living in that place, knowing you may soon be leaving. Again, the idea as opposed to the reality.

I wonder if migrating birds experience the same sense of loss? My snowbird friends are appropriately named.

The passing of time includes deadlines. Projects that could have been completed in July were hastily dealt with in September and October. Upon returning to Sundown (also a beautiful location – I am aware of my good fortune), we started clearing up the weedy garden and stacking wood before being taken over by appointments and other obligations. These chores will be done before snowfall.

Before leaving the Adirondacks, the dogs and I took our last walk around the road that loops through our community, a walk I’ve enjoyed for over 60 years. As a child I raced my father down this road (he let me win), and a few years later we kids buzzed through on snowmobiles. As teens my friends and I meandered along, singing songs and smoking cigarettes filched from our parents. As a middled-aged adult, I walked slowly with my elderly father. Now the same path is trodden by my dogs, my brother, and me. The familiarity of place, of history, is deeply comforting.

I wonder, would the place still inspire such intense emotions if we remained full time, without a recognition of the season’s ending?

Time alters us all. The world changes. On my father’s 44th birthday, July 20, 1969, he sat by the windows, drinking wine, watching the moon over the lake. He swore he saw the astronauts as they touched down. We were in the Adirondacks during the original Woodstock concert that took place not in Woodstock but in Sullivan County, where I live now. On the 30th anniversary of that concert we saw the mayhem on TV from a barstool in an Adirondack pub. At the time we lived in Saugerties, the site of Woodstock ’94, and we left town to escape the crowds. Over the years we have watched as the world moved along. We continue watching.

This past summer a small group of deer came through our yard at dawn and dusk to munch pickerel weed in the lake. Mergansers and mallards searched for food in our cove. A single loon fished not far from the dock. Red squirrels ran across the deck to look through the window. One summer in the 1980s my father fed peanuts to the squirrels who then became possessive, attempting to enter the house by clawing through screens. The squirrels watch us, we watch them.

And now as the earth spins and the seasons once again change, we watch for the midterm elections. Like our bodies and the land, our country has changed. My Adirondack neighbors, lifelong Republicans, worry about a revolution. Other members of my Adirondack family, also Republican, are more optimistic, anticipating movement back toward affordable prices and a government that respects the constitution and laws. As usual, I am stuck in the middle; it could go either way. Or something entirely unexpected may occur. I remember as we approached the millennium a college friend was panicked at the thought of computers crashing when the date changed from 1999 to 2000 – the Y2K scare. The panic was for nothing. Maybe that will be true now?

Each winter, while watching the world from Sundown, I close my eyes and envision the Adirondack house, empty and frozen. When I read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse the section that struck me was the middle of the book, “Time Passes,” in which the world continues as the house remains empty of human life. Mrs. Ramsay, the mother and anchor of the family, has died. World War I has begun. The family hasn’t returned for the season. People live, people die. And eventually those who remain return.

While in Sundown, I watch the lake from a webcam set up by the Raquette Lake Navigation Company: water, trees, snow, ice. I think of my empty, frozen house. And I imagine how, if all goes well, we will return in July for another season.