October Country

This is the time of year in Burlington when the days remain as hot as July's worst sweltering waves, but the nights are suddenly crisp and cool, a sort of first glimpse of the autumn lurking just over the edge of the calendar. At night in our upstairs bedroom with the windows open, the rich tang of burning fields carries on the gentlest breeze. A hint of woodsmoke and an imagined season of axes in blackened stumps and hot cider around campfires. Halloween is already lingering in the slanting yellow light, the darkening air of our patch of North Carolina.

Driving to Charlotte a couple of nights ago for a show, it occurred to me how vast and empty the highways in our state tend to be. None of the narrow serpentine curves and headlong traffic of the northern cities, just endless vistas of fields with the occasional neon sign sprouting on steel legs above a cluster of pines. Maybe it's that touch of sadness that creeps in with the coming fall, the lingering traces of bittersweet nostalgia in the atmosphere, but our interstates seemed to me lonely roads trailing off into the ether, a compass point reached and not returned from.