A Cold Gold Walk

  

It’s a cold winters day here at the Chicken Ranch. Wind chill in the single digits when I awoke. The kind of cold that makes your toes want to hide a little deeper in the warmth of your boots. The songbirds are crowded up in the bird feeder like shoppers in a store aisle on Black Friday. I know they’re just lookin for nourishment but I’d swear that they enjoy each others company as well. Jumping in and out peeping and pecking.

I take a drive around the fields and woods to the northeast and appreciate the varying shades of golden brown in the winter scene. Here and there hardy winter ground covers flaunt their little patch of greenness and look somewhat out of place amid the dominant gold and rust of the meadow. Intermittent clumps of bushes display deep maroon berries on naked limbs. I think they look like lonely left-behind Christmas ornaments. The bronze of the oak tree leaves and olive drab of the cedars append some offering of color in a valiant effort to break up the landscape. As I get out of the truck and stand on a knob the ribbon of road lights up with powdery snow as it cuts through the acreage below me.

The trees in winter look for the most part like they are upside down. As if the roots are upright and the foliage has buried itself in the ground like an ostrich's’ head, hoping to find relief from the cold. But some sway a little here and there in the frigid draft, as if to signal that they are yet alive and well. They remind me that they will themselves full with color again in the coming spring. “Patience” they seem to plead to the misty gray sky.

I am surrounded by waving shades of yellow, brown and gold as I walk through a deteriorating wooden gate and into the waist high prairie grasses. Some of the grass has a piping of roasted umber. I see a patch of parched earth where controlled fires washed across earlier this year.

As I head back to my truck, I push my big-hat down a little tighter on my ears and throw up my collar. A rabbit leaps from his hiding place. A gray spot with a flash of white tail bouncing up and down across the edge of the field. I take in another look and marvel again at how colorful winter can be in a sepia-tone sort of way. So many shades of gold on a golden mornings walk.