Signs of Early Autumn

We've all been surprised by how early the first signs of autumn have appeared, but we're not complaining at all. Despite my Southern upbringing and six years of adult life in Louisiana, I've lost my ability to revel in the nineties. Even the eighties discourage genuine hopefulness. So the early turning of the leaves brings a Happy Fall: felix culpa.

An hour before the sun rose on August 31, Alison found that her car was covered in a light frost. Three days earlier I built a fire in the woodstove because the house was 54 degrees at 5 p.m. In the bottom photograph above, a porcupine is waddling through the same frost Alison had to scrape from her windshield that morning.

The bucks' antlers and the apples are maturing at about the same time, and I'm spending a few hours here and there cutting the fallen aspens and the standing dead elms. Ironically, which is what weather talk is all about, Alison and I set up the screen house in a shady place as a relief from the heat and direct sunlight of the rear deck.

The top three photographs continue the tale of autumn's approach. The bold, bright red seeds are of a plant that must be closely related to skunk cabbage because of the mottled, fleshy stalk, but I will have to wait for one of my botanical friends to identify it for me. It grows down by the river, and I missed it while it was in blossom. In the marsh, the six-foot-tall asters and the even taller Joe Pye weeds are in their glory.

We're lucky to live along this river bottom. It's a wildlife corridor, and the first terrace above the marsh provides easy travel through it. In the eighteen months that we've lived here, the trail camera has captured a bobcat three times. That this corridor can support even these small predators we take as a sign that the local environment is relatively healthy yet. We hope for signs of bear someday, but I'm afraid that not everyone around here would welcome that as much as we would.

But here's a bit of news: Last Thursday evening, a friend who knows the difference between a mountain lion and a bobcat saw the larger of the two crossing the road in front of his car six or seven miles from here. He said it crouched slightly for a moment when it saw the car coming, and that its tail was thick and long. He speculated that it weighed 50 pounds or so, so it is a young cougar exploring beyond its birth area. It was near the Chippewa River, so it may be traveling in that well wooded corridor. We wish it well because of the general good health of the land in this region that it indicates.