Late fall shadows gathered outside my back door. I watched their approach. A bright, late fall afternoon that had sharpened fading hillside colors, began a reversal by pushing shadows across my near field. They were advancing slowly in my direction. Close by, individual shadows, a sort of a cast of characters composed of the apple tree, the white birch cluster, and the lower-level blueberry and honeysuckle bushes expanded into etched clones of themselves on my back lawn. The grass seemed not to care about their creeping trespass.

These lengthened shadows advanced silently toward me ’till they reached my feet and began their climb upward to cover me. Their manner of attack had not been sudden or quick enough to raise an alarm. I only noticed that daylight warmth simply had been defused into cool shade.

A strange thought occurred. What becomes of shadows when they fade? Are they still there, like lighted stars in a daylight sky? It’s as rare to see them as it is to call back something we’d thought of before. Once in a while I sense a thought that is quite familiar, perhaps a reincarnation of some old rumination. Conceivably that’s where the time-worn expression “out of sight, out of mind” originated. Be that as it may, I must move on as light moves the shade.

Still standing and watching the evening begin its metamorphosis from the day, the realization of how helpful at times shadows were, came to mind. While traveling with my tractor hauling a trailer and wondering if the load is staying put, all I need do is check the shadow traipsing along beside me to see if the binders are in want of adjusting. Working thus, I habitually watched moving shadows out of the corner of my eye. It was easy to do when there was a sharp sun behind them. They traveled alongside, flat for a ways, until the tractor and I passed a rise of ground and then they’d jump bolt upright and become exaggerated.

As a boy I used to enjoy watching the shadow cast by a steam train as it passed in front of taller buildings when the sun was just right. Those shadows would jump up and down, now short, now tall, from flat car to freight car and back to flat car again until the caboose ended the display.

Moving shadows can have a quiet violence about them, a violence that is able to startle a static scene. A sudden wind can toss even leafless branches until the trees complain, similar to an old rheumatic who has had cause to move too swiftly. Then, as suddenly as they rise, these spasms of violence fade.

The coming of night takes away the day as the arrival of dawn expels starlight. Except, of course, when the moon is bright. Unreal things appear in moonlight. Moon-shade, created from a paler light, often stirs the imagination more than shade from the sun. A night, lit by a pale moon, can fill one who hobnobs intimately with their imagination with both marvelous and peculiar thoughts. Such may explain a story recounted by Washington Irving in his “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” As the tale progressed, Ichabod Crane, a tall, lanky school teacher, riding on the back of Gunpowder, a horse whose saddle had slipped off, was attempting to escape from a black steed ridden by a heavy cloaked horseman. Irving wrote: “Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a tremendous crash — he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed and the goblin rider, passed by like a whirlwind.”

Children especially have been given a strong imagination and while looking at shadows can easily think they see what really isn’t there. Add natural fear to imaginary sightings, unreality rapidly becomes reality.

It is often in late October that apparitions (including ghosts and phantoms) frequently emerge as being real in the minds of children. Sometimes pumpkins give the appearance of moving about the sky as rising, shining, orange-black figures, fronting the moon. When morning comes these child-favorite orbs have returned to earth, where, cuddled against the corn shocks, they share the white frost and look angelic, as if they had always been there. When the children speak of these things, oldsters are apt to “shush” them having in mind the quieting of their fears. It becomes difficult for children to believe they really have never seen a pumpkin traveling through a sky.

Keep in mind, after all it’s really only Halloween!

Stacey Cole’s address is 529 W. Swanzey Road, Swanzey 03446.