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.

Typically, I don’t pay much attention to who’s eating at what plants in my gardens. But I have several stands of mistflowers, and the Queen butterflies (Danaus gilippus) so heavily populated the bunch in the new garden along the north fence that I had to stand and look yesterday. It’s a striking butterfly and compares favorably to the Monarch, and there were a lot of them on the plants. To anyone inclined to further study, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has a page dedicated to how to tell the two members of the Danaus subfamily apart.

Well, the prize went to the early morning riser today in my neck of the woods. There’s a nice cloud cover with just enough space for the morning sun to peek out beneath it and light things up. Golds, purples, reds, blues. You name ’em. The colors were there on the clouds, shifting and changing as the morning progressed, and I got tired of taking pictures.

A Painted Bunting came to visit yesterday. Out of pure serendipity, I happened to look out my window at just the right time. There he was, perched on the fence, leisurely eating seeds from the signalgrass that sprouted in the low ground by the south fence. He spent a fair amount of time there, too, and I watched as long as I could. Eventually, he hopped into the grapevines and disappeared.

The new garden along the north fence is rounding into form. The mist flowers I planted this spring have taken root and are expanding their footprint. The sage is in bloom. The chinquapin oak is flush with leaves. The yellow bells is getting ready for fall. I’ve decided to let the bindweed have the fence, but I’ve planted morning glory and alamo vine as alternatives. The latter came from seeds I potted on the porch.