Just as I had when the season of the Red-winged Grasshopper started almost four months ago, I find a blazing scarlet wing lying on a path, then see a single live grasshopper on this another sweetly warm afternoon in the mid 70s.  Polka Dot Beetles are also out, massing again in great numbers everywhere; they are hovering up to ten feet over the grass.

A Mountain Bluebird drifts down out of the sky, lights atop an irrigator wheel.  A chip of blue ice, Prince of the High Country, color of a glacial rivulet.

Sun is gone behind leaden clouds long before its moment to set.  In an astounding silence on the pastures, a pair of Great Blue Heron hunt–I’d bet they’re angling not for frogs but for gophers!  They’re colored the very grays and blacks of the sky above them.  The Tamarisk trees drift orange, and yellow, long avenues and rows and single Cottonwoods are nearly wholly green or green-and-yellow or gold, some are become empty gray crowns of twigs with their edges hoops of rich butter, others are artists’ wide brushes dipped in all these colors and stood upright in a jar.  The River is a palette of Thanksgiving hues.  The gallery forest’s colors are delicate, on this last day of November muted, like Christmas lights already placed but waiting to be lit with great fanfare by December Sun tomorrow.