Fall came. Every year, there was a lull between the harvests for the stand
by the road and the time that wood had to be cut before winter. Leaves fell,
the few trees that clustered at the end of the fields, anyway, since the
back of the property was mostly fir. The woods got quiet, the salmon berries
andsalal already dried and gone. Poison oak finally stood out, red against
the trees and bushes, rather than the hidden vines.

She loved fall for this, the one time she could run through the forest
carelessly, without coming home with a terrible red rash. She thought she
could smell the sea air, too, over the pungent smells of decaying leaves and
fir needles.

She spent weeks running through the back acres, barefoot at the height of
the day, wool sweaters and scarves by the time evening came. Things felt
cool and dry, welcome before the rain came and the blowing sleet.

The back acres had a few secrets to give up, too. A ruined shack sat on the
bank of the gravel-lined dry stream bed, and not far away, she had found
old, delicate lilac and blue bottles, shards of pottery, and some rusty
scraps of heavy metal that she later learned were old wagon springs.

Old things had never really caught her eye before, but having found the old
shed full of furniture and linens, she'd found her sense of them to be much
more acute.

------

This fall day had turned out to be one of the rainy ones. Cold, steady, slow
drizzle, not the fat drops of summer rain, making themselves known
separately, but a wetness that caught everything it touched in a cold, mute,
damp.

She squeezed the old key in her pocket.