I stepped outside just after dawn on Saturday to let the pups run free, albeit with a little supervision. It was a beautiful morning, air cool and clear and as crisp as any October day.
But this is still summer, or so the calendar tells me.
At that hour of the morning, the western sky is impossibly blue, pure cornflower — but with an electric intensity found only in stands of the actual prairie wildflowers, not in any Crayola box. On that day, the yellow spreading through the treetops made the blue that much brighter, as though the sky had robed itself in a fringe of pure gold.
It was not, of course, the heart-shaped leaves of the aspen above; those have only just begun to fade to a paler, duller green. Wings captured this image on an October day a two or three years ago, when the turning of the leaves had already begun accelerating, but were not yet entirely off their usual schedule. But the weeping willows have been turning for a month now, and there is more gold at their tops now than green.
Between the willows and the elms and the cottonwoods across the highway, between what remains of the wild sunflowers and chamisa now in full fall flower, we are at the heart of an early autumn already, our small world here gilding fast.
It’s ironic, given that the autumnal equinox this year is on the latest possible date it can occur: September 22nd, still eight days hence. Until then, colonial methods of calendaring insist that it is summer, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But this world lives by an older method of reckoning season and time, and we take our cues from it, not from a page in date book or posted on a wall.
And it’s entirely on brand for this terrible year that it should feel as though time is telescoping rapidly now, far faster than our ability to navigate it. The headlines this morning are already busy broadcasting doom: an assertion that the Arctic glaciers reached their irrecoverable tipping point two decades in the past; new wildfire spread across the west; five named tropical storms with the potential to become hurricanes, already spinning between the Caribbean and the Gulf; and closer to home, the mass die-offs of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of migratory birds all across the state.
The last is troubling for more reasons than we can count now, not least of which the apathy with which state officials (to say nothing of federal ones) have greeted the mounting reports. It has been happening here in this area, too, over the last week, in all of the surrounding areas . . . but not here, on this small space of land. Here, the migratory birds come in waves upon waves, flocks large and small, and not only our usual arrivals but many we’ve never seen here before. Among those who have never visited this land, at least in known and living memory, we have a new woodpecker pair, a nuthatch, more species of warblers than I’ve been able accurately to count. A pair of young Western scrub jays have returned, after their kind’s absence of several years now. The summering goldfinch pair remains with their family; the siskins have returned after having been here out of season in the early summer; more robins that we have ever seen in one place have taken up temporary residence now, raising their young to adulthood; the hummingbirds remain, if in somewhat reduced numbers now; and a chickadee (always a winter bird), one not known for residing here, has spent the whole summer with us and is ramp up his activity now as that season’s formal end draws near. The smoke plume has returned, too, but the wild creatures see this place as sanctuary, and we do our best to ensure that it remains one for them.
And that, too, is at the heart of autumn, early or otherwise: sustaining sanctuary. There are birds who remain with us year-round, but with winter’s come, so, too, come the coyotes and the elk. In October, we are usually visited by a bear, or perhaps two or three over those interstitial weeks before the real snow flies; our land seems to be a part of the path to the places they choose for hibernation, and we routinely find evidence of their passage through here (and on one memorable occasion, a sighting of the bear itself, a young one racing past the trash receptacles in the shadowy moments before the dawn).
Our goal is always for them to find their way to whatever place they belong, and to have safe passage while they are here.
And now, as I write, the other jays have returned to the feeder and the aspen outside the window: the piñon jays, smaller, bluer, with a language like that of their smaller bluebird cousins, also present now. Their scrub jay cousins tend to travel alone or i mated pairs, but these fluttering clouds of blue make their way in flocks, finding safety in numbers.
Meanwhile, humanity is forcibly separated by pandemic, public markers of the season canceled now, safety for us found in physical isolation rather than community. Perhaps it’s for the best for a short time, or rather, it could be, if humanity would instead use this time to turn to a healing reclamation of the earth. It won’t, of course, not in the colonial collective that holds sway now.
But we can, and we do. As we enter an early and foreshortened fall and prepare ourselves for winter, we do so with an eye on sustaining this sanctuary space, a refuge for the earth’s migratory children. We are already at the heart of an early autumn; if this world is to survive, we must find, and act upon, the love within it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
