From a distance, the farm fields hugging the two lane road from work to home are a soft and inviting tawny featherbed. With my eyes going just a bit unfocused, I imagine falling asleep atop a patch of their caramel-colored downy comfort. It’s also impossible to see the deer as they stand completely still in the middle of it all while I drive by. But up close and with eyes focused (as they should be when you’re driving, mind you), they quickly reveal their true nature—stick-y and poke-y with their dry rattling soybeans and papery corn husks. After hours spent scanning spreadsheets across dual monitors in a windowless office, though, I’m happy to give myself over to the illusion of a giant’s al fresco bedroom.

Autumn is nature’s long, luxurious yawn and stretch before she curls up and settles under the covers of a moth-eaten gray blanket of sky for the next four months, dreaming of spring. She’s earned a rest, after pushing bright red tomatoes out of slender green stems and colorful chard from the composted gifts of kitchen scraps and loamy soil. And all that grass she grew for us to walk through, barefoot! After spending the last six weeks without a lawnmower, Patrick finally tidied up eight or so acres of walking paths and open field gone wild. It took him two days and two levels of mower deck cutting (high first, to take down the bulk of the knee-grazing grassy weeds, and then low, polishing it to a smooth velvety green), transforming the scene from neglected to tended. We walked the full set of paths this morning after breakfast, the first of the season’s leaves slowly drifting down around us, talking as we do about plans for this section of the woods and that stand of multiflora rose in the meadow. In our usual shamelessly ambitious style, we overreach in our minds what it will take to finally clear out the brambles and give those young shagbark hickory saplings a chance. Forgetting we have full-time jobs plus a weekend farmers’ market commitment coupled with aging bones and not-thirty-year-old-anymore muscles, we make the outdoor project to-do list for fall with naive impunity and keep walking. One of us has the presence of mind to point out that whatever we rearrange we will also need to maintain; good to remember that as we look down the well-lit tunnel of our next twenty years.

Even the thought of collecting another couple of decades here makes us go all quiet and humble, filling the space between us with a rich gratitude. That’s eighty more seasons changing, 7300 sets of sunrises and sunsets (add in a few extra days to that for leap years) and forty more half-year property tax payments (a little realism to sharpen the edges of our romantic daydream). All of that too much for our minds to grab onto, it’s enough that we get to walk past a trellis full of vining spinach that needs to be harvested and prepped for the freezer as we make our way back to the house. On a brittle day in February, we’ll thank ourselves for putting in the effort as we sit down to dinner that night.

Summer was extinguished with the flip of a seasonal switch this year, humid and almost unbearable its final day, then cool relief the minute autumn’s equinox slid into place on a sunny Wednesday. A door closed on three months’ worth of warm balmy memories, from building another four raised beds for tomatoes and delicata squash to playing with Bumper in the thin grass of the old fasting site one sunny morning, a patch now encircled by maturing sycamores, red cedars and thickets of blackberry stalks. Did June even happen? It all seems so far away, blurry around the edges and idyllic. A lingering feeling of comfort rises to the surface and takes my face gently in its hands, “even your marvelous imagination, darling, is no match for the reality that surrounds you.” A reassuring lesson in trust.

When the trees are finally bare again, and this year’s harvest of leaves lies pressed and matted beneath my boots, I’m sure I’ll look back on a quiet early autumn Sunday and forget the exact date, but remember holding Patrick’s gloved hand in mine as we climbed the steep slope out of the meadow, our dreams unspooling behind us for the deer to contemplate.

Deep within every farewell is the promise of hello.