Hints of Autumn

It is late summer here at the Chicken Ranch and subtle changes occur in the landscape. As each day inches closer to autumn, nature is quietly initiating the change of the season. September here is often a month of extremes, hot and humid one week, cool and dry the next. It is not unusual to have nearly 100 degree temps at the beginning of the month, and frost just a few  weeks later. The weather changes, and so does the look of things around us.

As the hot humid days of summer melt away, the sky loses its slightly hazy nighttime appearance. The cool dry nights will present a clear dark canopy dusted with uncountable numbers of sparkling planets and stars.  The sky will become a deeper blue in the day, and fair weather clouds will appear as though an artist dipped his brush in white, and placed gentle strokes upon the canvas. The sun is a little lower in the southern horizon each day as it travels toward its winter position. On the ground change is evident also.

In the garden the pumpkins are growing a little more orange each day. They should be ready to offer up delectable pies and Jack-O- lantern faces before too many more weeks pass. Their leaves are yellowing as the vine passes all its energy to the basketball-sized fruit at the end.  The last of the green beans will be separated from their vines by me sometime today, and the purple tear drop egg plants have but a few offerings left. Tomatoes are brilliant reds and yellow, but their leaves too are browning, as the season comes to a close here. Grasshoppers jump like circus acrobats from plant to plant when I amble through these days, and butterflies perform their delicate and colorful ballets in the air.

In the fields, the yellow and brown colors, that indicate mature corn, are working up from the bottom of the stalks. The upright ears are drying, and slumping from their upright position. Soon they will all point straight downward on a stalk of khaki brown and the harvest will be at hand. The rich dark green soybean fields are tinting more each day in paler shades, and yellow is beginning to accent the fields. The hay fields are dryer and dustier now, and producing the final yields. The square hay bales are wagon bound to the barns, while the round bales look like giant caterpillars, as they are wrapped in white plastic and placed in long rows.

All around us the robust colors of summer are softening toward the paler shades of autumn. It is only the trees and bushes that still wait patiently for their chance to begin splashing one last flamboyant blast across the landscape before the duller colors of resting plants and  barren soil present the canvas of winter. And while the summer heat is currently still with us, the periodic nighttime dips of temperatures into the 40’s and 50’s offer a promise of the coming fall.

Let autumn with its finest qualities come. We’re ready for the change her at the Chicken Ranch, and glad for the bounty that the summer has provided. There is only a strong hint of the coming autumn now, but we look forward to its coming.  And sometimes the anticipation of a thing is half the joy.