Such a difference when you see the moonlight shining through a window or walking it in the nightly woods. Wood smoke from a campfire, aint wood smoke from a fireplace. Raspberry jam from a store, aint my jam. I like the real stuff. I admit it, I could take it all for all year. I'd give you any summer anytime to have a years' worth of fall. And when my year winds down with four minutes less daylight every day, it cramps my style. What style I have is being pushed gradually towards a snow bank. Yeah I know they aint here yet, but I can feel the pressure. I don't like having me pushed up against a schedule I can't argue with. Checking traps in the dark before work all week and then again after dark with all the other chores makes a Saturday in the late fall or early winter zip past like a bullet from a gun I'm not shooting and I want to say before life reloads another Monday, let's just let the chamber's smoke abit longer on the weekends. How come winter lasts forever, summer can just get to long winded and fall, oh my glorious fall, is over in a blink. One apple pie, one really big crock pot full of roast beef and the best part of autumn was already in and back out of my dishwasher like a burp from an over bearing onion. My timber landing is demanding my attention with its recent denuding of leaves. A stark difference from literarily just days ago when I foot loosed and fancied booted my way around looking for grouse with warm sunshine setting maples leaves ablaze in color. Poof, in one day they were gone, all dropped, all gone. Yes there's a couple weeks left and then perhaps some of those late sporadic warm days but we all know there won't be a month of it, so I hope for the best of the best for every day. I had enough average days this summer so why not hope for the best fall ever. Maybe that's being too greedy and in the end I'll make the best of whatever, but I aint gonna stop wishing. Which reminds me, before it's all gone for another year, the legendary lore of hunters long gone over the hill would utter a lament, possibly ripped off from the Jewish Torah that goes something like this, to my autumn this fall, this hunting season, do not leave me, without your fullest blessing. The trout whisperer