November

Clouds like smokey isinglass, sun from behind them like bouncing flames in the old wood stove in the shop when we were kids...back when mica made clear stone windows for stoves and when kids would ply the stoveblack on dull, rusty walls when needed...

Always in summer because winter stoves were busy.....

Stream-o-crows horizon to horizon, crow-go-home time, much closer to crow-go-out time than when the days are longer and brighter. Follow the river to the far west horizon and you can just barely spot them, dots of pepper at the white edge of the blue sky.

Ditto to the east, but overhead great big birds with a lot to say.....pepper to pepper, dust to dust. Caw.....caw.....caw.....

Water noisy in the wagon ruts and in the little freshet that runs down by the spring and in the fields themselves, muttering and chattering like so many blackbirds and fooling me every time.

A careful step is needed to wend in muddy rubber boots down coiling pathways from the hilltop toward the river.

It's pretty out there, the first sunny day in ages it would seem, but it's good to be down as well. Night is falling fast this 7th of November.

**Yes, I know mica and isinglass are not the same thing, but when we were kids they were synonymous and referred to the clear phyllocilicate  mineral used to make windows in old fashioned wood and coal stoves. The stuff would crack in layers and darken with smoke, forming magical patterns when the flames danced behind it.