We are committed far from home, but for a field of learning, the start and the finish is still here, still in place, just as that unique season of October, presaging a death in the glory of its color and clouds, brings the first frost, as if to say: “Regard necessity, in all its aspects. Look no further.” It never comes without warning. One night a thrashing, thicket-tearing wind arrives with much greater cold. Two nights later another wind blasts all warmth away, and when it dies down the frost settles in, leaving a crisp whiteness on the grass at dawn, and clouds of white vapor over the pond waters. The garden beans go limp and the wild indigo turns black. In that wind the low trees are like a sea, pluming and foaming. They are tossed and rocked, they pitch and writhe, while the stars in ordered majesty stream overhead. When the temperature starts to go down there is not a sound from the insect musicians any more, not one pizzicato, nor audible dry pulsing in the trees. You might think all breeding was over, though generation is latent everywhere. Then it grows warm again. The insects sound in the grass and in the trees, if to a diminished extent. Crows gather in the early morning, and their various calls, synchronized in the open air, over the treetops, sound highly melodious. I hear a robin caroling, but very quietly, almost out of a playfulness, a musing. In spite of inexorable change, there are false dawns, days, or hours of deceptive warmth that set the long-horned grasshoppers to their buzzing and clicking and the flickers to shouting with renewed energy. All through the woods tiny tree frogs pipe at intervals from the cover of damp leaves. The pools in the fishway at the Brewster Herring Run are loaded with warm October sunlight and three-to four-inch alewives going down to salt water. A kingfisher planes up from branches above the stream with a rattling cry. The pattern is one of reduction, depopulation, cutting down to size, but like all other shifts in a season, this one is manifested as another angle of light, a different feel to the air, a new set of circumstances, as much as a stop to all activity. When the fall winds swish and swoop along the shore, and I walk the tidal flats, a wide space played upon by light--gold, brown, and blue reflections running through pools and across long ribs of sand--I am regenerated by all the choices that are still ahead of me. Nothing is fixed or finished. It seems to me that everything I encounter is driven by indirection, like the waves and rivulets, sun tangled, that are crossing each other and separating over sand bars during an oncoming tide. Here is the ordered complexity which ensures that our findings, or rather, our search, will never have an end.