I WALK LONG, late September shadows again today, and again today light breezes are at play in them. I feel the heated sun in open-field places and in sun-slants among the shadows. I see a young girl dancing. It is the wind in a sapling big-toothed aspen, turning golden leaves over to shimmer with sun reflected from their pale undersides. She dances a moment in an open space, with little bluestem grass bronzing all around and gray goldenrod fading to seed on the sand flats where hatchling wood turtles have departed from their nests. She stands still, a sapling again, just for a moment, and then is dancing leaves once more, a young girl dancing on the restless wind, so supple, swaying and bowing in her circumscribed place in this clear field with crickets singing. As I read these signs of another season (I am old enough now that they seem an ancient personal history), the sun and the sand and the wind in the leaves and the dancing girl who cannot stay, a silent voice within me asks, as it has every autumn since I was a small boy, "Where does the season go?" And then asks the season, "May I go with you?"