On the night sky, an ordinary moment
of closure for the day

A recent Blue Norther elsewhere on the continent brought a little bit of a nip into the morning air, giving us out here on the ranch land a taste of cooler days and respite from weather that toasts grass, dries soil, evaporates pond water, and sometimes physically and mentally exhausts those of us who live out here.
There is a way the earth feels, sounds, and smells in cooler weather that is different from the rest of the year. It's been a pleasure to move through chores without breaking a sweat.
A brazen mother coyote has done away with two-thirds of the occupants of the chicken house and all of the guinea fowl, geese, and ducks. With stealth, she struck on days I was not here, days on which the chickens had been let out as usual to eat bugs and greens to their hearts' content. Here and there I've found a trail of feathers in the brush as she took her quarry home. I've penned up the last of the chickens, planting in their small, enclosed yard patches of rye grass which will come up quickly beneath the screened frames I've set on the ground.
Just before the weather changed, snakes seemed to be a bit more in evidence, so much so that our friend John didn't see the little coiled rattler when he picked up from the ground a piece of plywood to determine if it suited our purposes. Not once, but several times, I must have walked within inches of where it had lived under the damp shaded cover of wood. It was my sister Melissa dancing past me, light on her feet and with adrenaline momentum and a song of mild expletives -- kind of a snake rap -- that alerted us to that which moved if you stepped on it. The moment kept us on alert the rest of the day and we worked at mowing, weeding, and leaning left-over wood scraps on the building rather than leaving them on the ground.
I savor the days out here when the temperatures are less oppressive. The cooler weather lends the morning burst of the sunrise at the horizon a stroke of glory that registers in the heart. The delicious wafts of cool night air are redolent with the fragrance of calitre and Mormon Tea that blows in from the pastures. And the night sky is as it always is in clear weather, a shroud of star-studded indigo mystery of bright and lesser pinpricks of light. The evening sky-watching ritual is the same for me, an ordinary moment of closure for the day in which I find my bearings with the dippers and then lose my thoughts in the stardust ribbon of the Milky Way.
It's only now in this fall break from the heat that I understand that the dry summer months inspire in me an inordinate anxiety about how the cattle and the pastures will fare, an anxiety that sometimes spills into the rest of my life.
On a recent cool morning I inventory the status of projects nearing completion -- much to do with the painting of steel and the slowing of oxidation. I look around at the abundant, waist-high grasses in the pastures, understanding how lucky we are to be going into winter with good forage.