Time of gold, not of green, the season’s colors over the wilds around us are truly changed.  The day is stuck in a Summer time warp, however, and is another one hot and stuffy and so the race across the pastures to get irrigating done is uncomfortable.  Good for the new crop of Winter pasture, though, and only five days after the watering on them was started the pastures are noticeably sprouting single wonderfully-green blades of oats or barley.  Insects have come again to add bright dashes of color: cobalt blue dragonflies with silvery wings, and a few blue damsels (though these damselflies will be the last of that kind to be seen …), Red-winged Grasshoppers are as abundant as the wintering sparrows I flush out with them.

Poorwills are all along the road on the much further drive home I now have, they fly up into the headlight beams with a flash of white glowing in their tails and then hunker down in the deep dust that still holds the day’s 85 degree warmth.  The sky flashing in lightning as a thunderstorm sweeps in from the North promises that the first deep cold will arrive soon as the front clears out towards the East.