If you missed it, you should spend a few minutes reading this beautiful piece by Christopher Solomon (contributing editor at Outside magazine) that ran in the New York Times last month. It’s a meditation on the nagging worry of the impending winter and what it will bring this year.

He writes with a lilting, melodic style that brings you right into his moment, even if you’ve never been there yourself. Sentences like: “October’s yellow afternoons smell of winter at the edges. The soft ovation of the cottonwoods sends another round of leaves adrift on the water.” or “We put our hands on the still-warm granite of the climbing pitch rather than cook down the applesauce. We take ridgeline hikes among larch the color of struck matches when we should be at the work desk. We run for hours through the mountains without thought of tomorrow’s soreness, or the firewood left uncut. We tear at the days immoderately, like animals, and we wolf them down, hoping to fill a hole we see yawning ahead.”