The seasons take another turn in Phillips Bay, North America’s quintessential hometown. Your stroll along Seven-Mile Walk has reached the Beecher House, where the famed poet lived through the mid-1960s.

A young girl, her basket laden with freshly cut flowers, pauses to admire the fiery red and tawny orange of the Indian summer maples, as the poet certainly once did. The sun has dipped below the horizon leaving a soft-pink glow in the sky and one by one the lights begin to twinkle across the Inner Bay.

Soft water sounds are carried on an irregular warm-cool breeze, another hint that fall has arrived at the hidden treasure that is Phillips Bay.