We can see into the woods now that the leaves are down. The stone walls are visible again from the road.

They are the pyramids of New England, surely as recognizable from space as any of the world’s great stone structures – all built by hand – if only someone had been circling overhead to see them when they crisscrossed every hill and valley of the region’s cleared landscape.

There is so much dead wood in the forest, most of it on the ground, some of it waiting to topple over. I spy several more trees and limbs down around our property, victims of some destructive force since spring. Snow will arrive to give them a proper burial among the leaves until the April melt, when we will see how winter’s occasional fury has contributed to the regenerative process.

It is hard to say which hand comes down harder on nature, summer or winter. A nearby microburst in early August felled six trees in less than 10 minutes, four of them across the driveway. We can ask Eversource. I believe they will say their trucks are out more often in winter.

In the meantime, the mower deck is coming off the lawn tractor to make it easier to reach the trees that lay sprawled on the forest floor. I will saw them up, throw them in the wagon and haul them back for burning. Nothing is wasted, one way or the other.

The screen windows came down, which is like unwrapping cheesecloth from around the house. Someone explained that a screen in front of a fireplace traps 50 percent of the heat. (Note: the fire department would argue it is a small price to pay for safety. Underwhelming heat is better than overwhelming heat, if you know what I mean.)

Window screens must have a corresponding effect on light through a window. It feels wonderfully brighter in the house with them gone. Nonetheless, we will open the windows freely to enjoy the last few warm days of autumn; only a few lethargic flies and wasps remain to invade our space from the outside.

We should be rid of two-cycle engines until May, or most of them. Chainsaws will stay around, but not the string trimmers, leaf-blowers and other machines that go “VREEEEE” instead of “VROOOM.” There is, at least, a level of excitement that attaches to the sound of a chainsaw. Its sound makes us curious about who is doing what in the woods next door. We may even go to the window to see. No such excitement or trips to the window attach to the sound of a leaf blower unless it is cocktail hour.

There is a level of excitement that attaches to a Suzuki motorcycle screaming down the road— “vreeeeee” — but we should be rid of those, too, until May. Thank merciful heaven.

Welcome to standard time. You can see your neighbor’s house. You can see into the woods. You can see your way to spending the afternoon on the couch watching football. Disruptions of the growing season have fallen away. The cows are nearly in the barn. The docks are out of the water, and soon we may be able to stroll across the ice to the opposite shore.

You may be thinking, but what if the measure to end standard time passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in May is adopted by the House of Representatives? What will happen to standard time?

Nothing.

Jarvis Coffin and his wife Marcia owned New Hampshire’s oldest inn, The Hancock Inn, during which time he wrote a popular newsletter for the inn’s mailing list. Retired from innkeeping, he now writes full-time, mostly essays on rural life and fiction. You can reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and visit postcard-from-monadnock.ghost.io to keep up with his other musings on the Monadnock Region.