The crickets are still singing.

It is the first week of November, and this morning the thermometer outside the kitchen window read 63 degrees, a number that belongs to September and has no business standing on the doorstep of winter. The sun lies low and long across the drumlins, gilding the last leaves. The air smells of warm earth and cut grass. If I did not keep a calendar, I would not know what season this is.

I should know better than to trust it. I have lived beside these lakes long enough to know that November is not tender here. It is the month of steel skies and sideways rain, of wind coming off Ontario with an edge like a newly sharpened blade. It is the month when the vineyards give up their last leaves and stand bare on the hillsides, when the tundra swans come down out of the north in long, ragged lines and settle on the wide water at Montezuma. November keeps its appointments. It always has.

And yet. The crickets. The 63 degrees. The low sun warm on the south side of the barn, where the last bumblebees of the year are working the blossoms of a geranium I never brought in. A red maple at the edge of the yard still holds half its color, in no hurry, as if it too has heard the forecast and decided there is time. Out in the cut fields, the geese glean stubble through the mild afternoons, lingering over the scattered grain like guests who have not noticed the hour.

This is borrowed time. The warm days were not owed to us. Nothing in the almanac promised them. Sometime next week, the forecast says, a cold night will slide down from the north, and the geranium, the crickets, the maple, this whole small congregation of the unseasonable, will get the news all at once. What is blooming now will not bloom again this year.

So what does one do with days we did not earn and cannot keep?

I have been thinking about the workers in the vineyard. In the parable, the landowner goes out one last time at the eleventh hour and finds laborers still standing idle in the marketplace. He sends them into the field, and at evening he pays them the same as those who had worked since dawn. The ones who bore the heat of the day cannot quite make peace with it.

I used to read that story and side with the early workers. It seemed only fair. But I have come to hear the landowner’s question as one of the kindest in scripture: Are you envious because I am generous?

Grace has never kept office hours. It does not arrive by seniority or merit. It comes the way this week has come: late and mild and unearned, at the eleventh hour of the year, standing in the doorway with the evening cool behind it and offering a full day’s warmth to a season that had nearly finished its work.

We do not earn the warm days. We cannot bank them. All we can do is what the bees are doing on the south side of the barn: receive them. We can live in them fully while they last, without grasping, and without the worry that spends the gift counting the hours until it ends. Gratitude is not a hedge against loss. It may be the only honest way to hold something that will not stay.

Soon the wind will swing around, the cold will come down, and November will remember itself. The crickets will fall silent, having sung every day they were given.

That, I think, is enough.