Autumn feels rather like spring, cool and aloof with impending change. Neither season stays for long, tugged on one end by the fiercest days of summer and rushed on the other by snow. It's simpler to notice now that the days have slowed for good, no longer fleeing for fear of a change that won't permit familiar changes to return. I feel the dry earth beneath my feet and the absence of rain against my face. Winter must be on holiday, perhaps to meet with Summer for a spell before he takes run of the land.

This window has become a picture-frame, enclosing in four neat corners what I once watched over rounded sills. It's different, of course. There was never such changelessness in the Shire, never such subtlety on the threshold between one season and the next. Perhaps that's how Winter has managed to play a trick on me.

You couldn't stay for long, as dearly as I would have loved your company. Better that you think me vague and doddering by now, better that you pass on home. The things that need doing in the Shire by now, they're not for the likes of these fingers. The best that I can do is hold a pen, and that I shall do for as long as I can. As you had better, too, when the time comes. Fingers last no longer than autumn leaves.

You've been as far as the Black Land and back, lad, yet no journey's been as long as the one from Elrond's doorstep back to the road again. I see it in your step, feel it in my bones. You've left something here just as you left something where the ravages of battle couldn't reach. If not for your Samwise, it might have lain abandoned.

Whatever else I may have lost, I haven't begun to go blind. I watched the pair of you after nightfall, passing hand in hand under the heavy trees until I could watch no more. That was always your best trick, wasn't it, leaving bits and pieces behind you? Quite a few of them made it back, usually in better condition than you'd left them.

I have no reason to believe that your heart is any different.

~finis~