We are a couple of hours into the new season. Each of us woke this morning and thought: “We need a fire.” Friends were just here for the tail of summer, but each fall there is a morning when the cool damp weights our chest and abruptly makes us want a fire in the wood stove. It’s a day not to worry, but to hold moments before us, remember trust, and revel in the reliability of the world. Today was that day.

When we first moved to my family’s coastal home, we heated exclusively with wood. I was home with our young children, squeaking by financially and suffering isolation, but enjoying my competence. I could bake and cook and clean. I took the boys for three-mile walks. I could light a fire with two bits of kindling, a half-page of newspaper, three pieces of split fir, and a single match. I kept the house warm. A fourth or fifth piece of cordwood would do the job most days until the next.

Adding the third bedroom and the new state requirement that we install a flue liner, reduced the efficiency of the fireplace insert. The entire stone and brick surround had warmed and held the heat, giving it back throughout the night. After the change, we needed more wood on the fire.

We have electric heat now too, but find comfort from firewood.

The last week we saw a plankton bloom which shows on the sand in sticky microscopic animals and plants, blending into a foam the waves push onshore. Each retreating wave left a line of khaki plankton. This happens when mineral-rich cold water comes to the surface and is heated by the sun—plankton thrives.

No pelicans today, but the beach is empty. No sea glass found on our walk. I found my first two-spot feathers. A bit of fishing tackle. A single pale gold and amber flat-smooth stone. I’m grateful to be walking. When walking no longer hurts at all—I hope by next summer—I will begin running again. Today, I believe that will happen.

There has been dry sand in front of our house for weeks, for most of the summer. Even now the tide has left the sand dry twenty or thirty feet out from the basalt cobbles that line the shore. We mostly saw single line of breakers during the last month. Just now, now that it is officially autumn, five lines of breakers and the water is foamy and white. The sun is out, mist on the horizon but we didn’t need a fire after all. Surely the weather is changing, and we will not mind the rain. It will come, the rain that almost never comes down but sideways. We do not mind the change in seasons.

I’ll be back on Friday.