Stark Days

Sunday morning, out early in a new day, I felt the difference immediately. The road was lighter, the woods yawning open to the left and right. 

It wasn't a cheerful lightness. It was a vacancy. Something was missing.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened, that the hard rains of Saturday had flushed most of the leaves from the trees, that we had, overnight, slipped from autumn into winter. That the stark days had begun.