I like the black of night. The dark. Especially around the house. It’s comforting to step out onto the porch and see what only the light from the moon and the stars allows me to see. I feel one with the natural world. There's the wind and the leaves and rustling grasses. I see the movements in the shadows, hear the rhythmic noise of walking, especially the deer. 

Odd thing about life, when I go looking for something, I hardly ever find it, but when I’m not looking here something comes. On Tuesday night, I wasn’t looking for the Northern Lights, but I found them. On Wednesday night, I went looking, but didn’t see them. I did see a shooting star that felt really close, and that was a nice substitution, because I’ve gone looking for shooting stars before and never found them.

It’s exactly the sort of call you want in the middle of the night while dead asleep. “Dad! Go outside and look at  the Northern Lights.” I did as I was told and was rewarded with the most colorful night sky I’ve ever seen. And I was happy I lived in a country town with a dark sky ordinance, where the night sky counts as something we want to see and it’s not just a thing that hangs over our heads.

There’s a cold wind blowing, dried leaves are skittering down the dog run, heading south. The visiting Monarchs are departed. The heifers and their calves stopped by to feed this morning, and spooked when I came out onto the porch with my morning coffee. The cat boxes are ready for their first real test. Heat lamps go up this afternoon. I feel mostly recovered from whatever bug it was that bit me the other day. Pretty sure it was allergies, but isn’t that what everyone says.

More on the Monarchs. They’re sleeping in the Mesquite tree by the Evergreen Sumac. I assume they’re catching their breath before they continue their migration. I’m glad I’ve got a hotel with a nice restaurant close by for them. It makes me wonder if they were here last year or the year before, and I simply didn’t notice. It’s entirely possible. In the last several years November, for me, has been a month of travel and getting ready to travel. So, we easily could have been on separate journeys.

A swarm of Monarch butterflies stopped by yesterday to visit. They dined on the blooms of the Evergreen Sumac growing at the east corner of the south porch. It’s a first, and I was happy to be of service as they made their way south to breed. Milkweed may be a favorite food, but they sure seemed happy with the Sumac’s flowers. It will be interesting to see if there are more today.

A sure sign of winter for me is the moment after sunset when there is still light to see but it’s all indirect. In that moment, the landscape is nearly colorless. The grass is brown and the green trees dull. Everything seems lifeless and you know the cold is coming. I had that moment last night as I sat in my front room and looked out at the pasture just beyond my fence.

It’s a bright, cool Sunday morning. Early on, there was a heavy fog on the park pasture as the moist, warm ground met the cold northern air. It’s gone now, chased away by the sun. The rain washed air is clear and clean. The forecast for the week is dropping temps. We’ll soon be down in the 40s at night. Not really earth shaking news if you live somewhere else, but it’s what’s happening here. So, it's all I’ve got.

We had a big rain last night, and now I get to use words like turgid because the earth is full and swollen with water. Digging, if digging needs doing, will be easy and I have some I want to do. Formerly wilted leaves are fat with water and standing tall, and if you’re a tree it’s a good way to go into winter, with a belly full of water. On my little plot of earth, the rain gauge says we got an even inch. That’s six gallons on a square yard. If more falls today it will probably run off and head to the rivers.

Winter’s coming. That’s the promise. Rain tonight. Cool next week. Not cold, but it’s a start. We’ve already got the dark. The sun is off to warm other climes. It’s another phase in the long dance of our spinning planet around its sparkling sun as both move through the universe in tandem. Lot’s of forces at play.

Love is in the air. At least for my orb weavers. Two female garden spiders are hanging out at my place. One is in the dog run, and the other is out by the pool. Each is flanked by webs spun by their male counterparts. I don’t know how they decide to get together or who comes calling on whom. All I know is the victorious male will die shortly after the deed is done. I wonder if he knows that? Does die happy? The female will then lay her eggs in a nice sack and probably pass on sometime after the first frost.

I’m in a pickle. I have a spot on a back lot where I want to create a little garden area. I’ve set up some old fence panels to act as a trellis. I’ve got seeds for vines to grow there. I have numerous flowering plants at my disposal. In the center, however, I want a tree, but if I want it to grow to any size while I’m still alive, it will have to be a fast grower, and I’m more a fan of slow. The latter are sturdy trees with fine grained wood, and long lived. The former are brittle, drop branches, and die quick.

I was visiting with a friend the other day and we were talking about music and listening, the type of listening you have to do to really hear a symphony or a concerto and he made an interesting observation. He thought a great many people simply listened to music just to drown out the silence, because they were afraid of the silence.

I like periodic flowers. The ones that show up just for the briefest of moments. The ones you see only if you're looking. For instance, in the dead grass of the back lots, I now have rain lilies, which as the name suggests means they come up after a rain. I also have schoolhouse flowers that are now blooming in their September, welcome back to school display. Lovely blooms in both cases.

There’s a warm stillness in the air, fed no doubt by rain, the air is just too heavy to move, laden with moisture as it is. We expect a wet weekend, but the rain will be spotty and I doubt any of the rivers will flow because of it. Although maybe the odds will fall in the river’s favor and it will flow again, at least for a while. I think we’d need more rain than the good earth could handle to get the aquifers back up so that the springs ran once again.

Nothing quite compares to the thrill of walking out your backdoor in the dark of the early morning to feed your cats and finding yourself face-to-face with a yellow garden spider with its web wrapped around your head. It’s an arm thrashing thrill. I’m pretty sure the spider was equally excited. I mean, as meals go, I would have been a big one. But I got away, fed the cats, and helped the spider relocate.

It’s a cool, still morning here at my little homestead. Fall is just around the corner, although it’s not that big a deal in Texas. In fact, it could stay hot well into October. But the plants know, and they’re getting ready.  Leaves are turning. Blooms are falling. It’s the light. It comes later. Leaves sooner. The perennials are thinking about their roots. The annuals are saying good-bye.

The removal of the dead has commenced. All throughout the garden stand the remains of the seasonal plants, almost all natives, who have succumbed to the heat and lack of rain. This includes grasses of course, because we are at the edge of the country and windblown seeds find my yard a convenient way-point. The digging or pulling is sometimes difficult because the ground has hardened, but that is normal.

My trips to Big Bend are always humbling and rewarding. First, it’s a big, relatively empty place, with lots of space between its mountains, and there are mountains galore. Humanity, despite its best efforts, has managed only the tiniest of footprints, and even those feel slightly tenuous, and are nothing compared to the memory of the dinosaurs that once roamed the landscape.

There was a banging in the fireplace yesterday. It’s too early for Christmas and Santa Claus, so I thought it might be an animal of some sort. Once upon a time, we had a fireplace where chimney swifts lived, and they made a raucous noise. But this was the heavier knocking of a much larger beast. So, I went outside to look and see what I could see.