"It's getting evening, Mom."

The leaves have fallen. The pumpkins left sitting on the back deck have frozen to mushy sad things. Our gas stove has finally arrived.  This week I cooked lentil soup with curried chicken, venison and vegetable stew, and oatmeal with slivered almonds and cranberries.  I baked butternut squash and piles of muffins.  It's the fall of the year, the hunkering-down time.  The it's-cold-let's-cook-something time.  And thankfully, we're nearly settled into our new house.  The siding is up, the attic and well house insulated, all but five of the boxes unpacked. 

The time change still caught me by surprise, of course.  At four o'clock the boys start saying things like, "It's not getting evening, Mom!  It's not time for dinner!"  And at six o'clock they claim, "It's too late for baths tonight."  On work days, we chase the sun home, driving south fast through dark valleys surrounded by sunlit hills. 

There are a lot of words for the time after sunset but before dark, but maybe not enough to adequately capture what that time is like in a place with very few electric lights.  There's "twilight," of course.  I always think of twilight happening on clear, crisp evenings, when Venus and a crescent moon show up early and the trees stand out starkly against the green-blue sky.  Twilight comes before cold Milky Way nights.  "Dusk" is a warmer word, the deepening of purple-y darkness that comes with faint mists that gather on summer lawns.  Dusk stretches lazily into firefly time.

Then there's "the gloaming."  The gloaming is the half-light for prowling.  It's the time when brightness bleeds out of the sky suddenly and the shadows congeal.  The trees gather together and whisper, a little menacingly.  When the gloaming comes, the children stop their shouting and frolicking and appear at your side.   Their little hands find your big ones, their saucer eyes turn up and they ask quietly to go home.  The back of your neck pricks with the same unease that they feel, and your eyes scan 360 degrees of gathering grey.  You assure the little ones that there are no big predators any more, nothing that could eat a person.  And in the same moment you say it, you realize that you are the size of a large doe, quite safe from coyotes.  The children are the size of twin fawns, which coyotes eat all the time.  You tell them to sing a song so they won't be afraid, and holding hands tightly you hustle them singing and laughing across the last 100 yards of deserted mountain top to the waiting car.  Twinkle, twinkle.  Your eyes dart around as you buckle seat belts and close doors.  The fabric of the car seat feels solid on your back and the headlights turn on with a satisfying click.

Then there is deer-light.  Deer-light only happens during a certain time of year when the world has gone a soft brown-grey, and the coats of the deer have faded from their summer russet to the same drab color as the ground.  Deer-light is also a special moment, a tiny sliver of the twilight or dusk or gloaming.  Deer-light is dark enough that deer fur is invisible against the natural background, but deer-light is still too bright for car headlights to send back the tell-tale reflection of a moving eye.  In the fall, the deer graze in the hay fields and wait for their moment.  When it comes they fade into ghosts intent on one mission:  Cross the road.  Compelled by some primal urge -- perhaps the knowledge that the coyotes haven't eaten enough and winter is coming -- they saunter on to the pavement by two and threes and sevens, and stand there, waiting.

Duncan, Tristan, and I come home by running the gauntlet in the deer-light.   We sit in our little metal bubble of music and light, stopping and starting, and sometimes honking.  The boys complain, "It's taking too long!" and shout out when they see deer I haven't.  But we finally arrive.  Then we tumble out of the car, across the dark lawn, and into the house.  Grateful to be home.