The other day a cold wind thrashed about in the trees, blowing some of the remaining leaves high into the air. I'd been planning a walk for lunch, but the fury of crashing branches under heavy gray clouds convinced me to stay inside and do yoga.

That night, a constant roar surrounded our little house. There is a chaos to the weather that is oblivious to our supposed mastery of the universe. The wind pressed in upon the warm glow of light and the faint echoing roar of the wood stove.

Our society is "civilized," so for many of us poverty is a matter of numbers and autumn is about leaves and cornstalks. But outside there is an edge to the flurry of activity. Little birds like chickadees, nuthatches, and brown creepers flock together for protection and the benefit of extra eyes looking for scarce food. The forest is full of calls instead of songs as fair weather birds are drained away by migration. If there's a reason that the veil between the worlds is thin on All Hallow's Eve, I imagine it is this: fall is a time of reckoning. In the forest, most of the food that will keep scatter-hoarders like chickadees and squirrels alive throughout the winter has already been grown.

We're lucky we don't have to count on the sack of potatoes I grew this year lasting us through the winter. Many wild plants have their own version of storage tubers. Mayapple dies back to the root which winters in its own version of a root cellar, the soil. Even flowers that haven't been seen since spring such as trillium and trout lily are lying in a stasis of roots or bulbs, a latent understory just below the surface. Before European agriculture, logging, and housing development, northeastern woodlands were much more stable environments, while grasslands dealt with fire as well as transitions to woodland and wetlands. Spreading one's progeny was a more sure strategy than trying to stay in one place. Many grassland flowers such as goldenrod and asters have a great many flowers which turn to seeds attached to a white fluff that catches the wind. Mayapples, trilliums, and trout lilies have one flower per plant or less and even woodland asters have less flowers per size than grassland asters.

However many seeds they produce (or spores, in the case of the sensitive ferns pictured below), their effort is over for the season. Some will be eaten, some will land in inhospitable territory, but all that's left is hope and waiting.