Letter from the Editor

You can feel it.

One evening, a breeze will greet you, draping like cool silk down the ridgeline. It’s always the evening— golden hour, when the wheatfields glow like yellow jasper— when she arrives. Summer melts down to Nothing, and Nothing becomes Autumn: the golden hour of the year.

Creaking, brambly, aching Autumn.

We lament the end of Summer as the river drops and the land burns. We scramble for the last swim in the lake, the last wildflowers, the last of the long days. We’re so eager for Summer that Autumn takes us by surprise.

The nights begin to cool, the evening creeps in— it begins with rain and ends in embers. Sage mountains, their dry summer trees cocooned in smoke, grow golden Larch freckles. Our Great Horned Owl, hidden from the swelter, takes up his nightly station on the roof. Pheasants cackle in the field again, cawing to each other across the valley. This is a new kind of awake— the awake before dusk, awake of night, howling at the Harvest Moon.

Somewhere between waking and sleep, in fog-cloaked morning yarrow, in steam rising from the river, in damp earth, we return to ourselves— like smoke reaching to the cosmos, returning to stardust.