Each year, a certain autumn day breaks and slips over the Connecticut River, covering the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with morning light. It is the beginning of a reunion for me. It happens on a weekend in October, when the leaves are radiant and still on the trees, and the sun spreads westward through all that color, coating the land like spilt maple syrup. Each year I return to see it, driving east to make a homecoming. I leave my in-laws’ house in the crackling cold and stop in Eden, Vermont, for coffee and a cinnamon doughnut, at a store where bear hunters buy tins of chew and dairymen scrape their boots on the mudroom sill.

Over Eden Mountain, the road turns down and the coffee is weak but hot; it scalds my fingers when the washboard dirt road shoves my rear tires toward the ditch. On the east side of the Lowell Mountain ridge, the stars shine brightest, and I know I’ll be meeting that advancing day in the scrub edges of the sleepy countryside ahead. There will be dog bells and scratched hands and sweat-stained shirt collars, and everything I’ve waited for since the last bird season closed, a long nine months ago.