You feel it in the mornings most: lingering in bed past the alarm, a dread of your warm soles’ first contact with the cold, fir floor. But you wrap your robe around yourself and walk, shivering, to the kitchen, hoisting the blinds to let in another day.

The windows are beaded with condensation: everything which was warm and humid from last evening’s bustle and conversation has been reduced to this: a scrim of moisture refracting fence and trees.

It is a pulse, this diurnal cooling and rewarming, one more cycle enmeshed in the many, and you begin to see the cottage as a living thing. Every night the few carefully added degrees dissipate, leaking out through walls and windows, drawn up towards the pinprick stars, down into the earth.

But through the day the sun slowly works away at the interior, its rays soaking through the roof and walls, warming everything by small degrees. Your own body contributes its meager radiance as well, beginning with that key-click in the door-lock: home from another day of work. And as the corn water comes to a boil for dinner, as the oven warms, you can feel the house waking from its dormancy, stretching, creaking: glad to have your company again.

And soon you’ll need the furnace on, grow reaccustomed to its mindless, insistent chuff and thrum. But for a few more end-of-summer days you’ll shiver deliciously and enjoy the silence; you’ll smooth the goosebumps from your upper arms and tell yourself it’s really not so bad.

The days are shorter, and the sun sits so low on the horizon that it slips briefly behind Belcarra as we pedal west from home. In Cates Park there are already maple leaves — a chaff of copper — beside the path: earlier than usual, the trees stressed by the hard, dry summer now ending. One leaf has settled on the stone marker which notes Malcolm Lowry’s years spent squatting at the nearby beach. The inscription reminds us that the path we’re riding is his “forest path to the spring”. But this is now a “forest path to the fall”: spring still too far off to hope for, the earth with another half an orbit to complete.

Gulls ride the breeze far below us as we make our way up the Second Narrows Bridge, their eyes intent on the currents tumbling past the bridge piers, ready to drop suddenly on any scrap. I spot a flock of Canada Geese floating on their reflections, drifting slowly on the Seymour River where it slips beneath the railway bridge to meet the rising tide. Soon they will start their great migration, scrawling their ragged Vs across a greying sky.

So, here we are again, at the hinge of seasons.

Here we are, and now.