Autumn is a cool, crisp breeze and a calico-paved sidewalk, with leaves crunching under your winter boots.

Last year’s threadbare mittens appear and pumpkins grin from porch steps — their crude faces mapped out with Sharpies. Cinnamon-scented candles crowd around the centerpiece — a cornucopia with its ripe, red bowels spilling onto greasy napkins and gilded china. Warm croissants and hot-cross buns march out of sweltering oven mouths, and windows rusted shut from long summer days are cranked open like floodgates, releasing plumes of rich steam into the frost-bitten fall air for the wind to whip away.

The woodpile is growing in the shed; a red-handled axe shivers in its cedar cell. The cornhusk-and-wheat arrangements, stiff shells of life, adorn front steps in their tall tin canisters, eerie arrangements breathing brittle winter into the festive air.

Ponies with oiled black harnesses, unseen all year, clop down windswept streets draped with premature twinkle lights, and storefronts with the doors wedged snug against the northerly gales fling wide with a clamour of pealing bells.

The storeowner complains, hugs her aproned chest and shivers. There are cookie tins emblazoned with biblical scenes clustered around the front till, and every now and then, the clink of spare change ripples across the room.

A gaggle of women file past, their hips padded down with chunky wool sweaters. There are men in corduroy suspenders with their caps tugged down over their eyes and their checkered scarves flapping at their necks; girls in chic plaid and boys in ski jackets; pre-emptive winter wear.

Tabby cats are dozing in truck beds, crows in the hay bales. Dogs cringe away from plastic tridents and pointed red horns strapped to their skulls in honour of Halloween.

There is sweet, stinging smoke in the air and plastic rakes propped up against the mottled leaf mountains in backyards. The ink-black shapes of birds blot out white skies. Lawns are receding. The earth can breathe again.