Winter has returned to the foothills. When the clouds lift, the upper half of the foothills are dusted with snow. White, gray, subtle shades of blues and dark greens, winter here is a palette of pastels.

I enjoy going out this time of year. Every day is a chance to watch the swans. It’d be nice to know where this group of swans came from. Where in Alaska or Siberia did they spend their summer? There is a pair with their young swans, but is it two pair with their young, or a pair with their young from two summers ago along with the young from this summer?

And where did the swan winter two hundred years ago when the valley was thick forest? On the large lakes? Along the rivers? And how has the change in diet affected them? What they forage in wheat, corn, and potato fields must be different than what they forage in lakes and rivers.

I would enjoy having the swans drop by to swim in our little pond, but it is too small. Swans are like jumbo jets. They need long runways to take off and land. I’ve seen large peahen blast straight up into the air with their powerful wings, but swans need a running start to take to the air. Watching them take flight is like watching jets lumbering to the end of a runway and leaving the earth just before they run out of runway.

A bobcat is paying us visits. We saw it walk up the lane between us and the neighbors during the afternoon a few weeks ago. This week a motion sensitive camera I set up in the woods caught it walking near the cabin where I make tofu on Thursday night and Friday evening. A blackberry vine got in the way of getting a clear picture of it, but if you look closely you can see it walking by.

It is unnerving and exciting to have such a magnificent cat strolling through the woods. But I am keeping the chickens inside their fenced yard for the time being.

I don’t want the chickens to share the fate of the squirrel this tail belonged to. I found the tail on a trail in the woods. I don’t have proof that the rest of the squirrel ended up in the bobcat, but chances are good that it did.

The fall leaves are past their peak. Many are down. Many of the trees are bare. A week of rain and showers is in the forecast. It’s time to take out my rake and enjoy making huge piles of leaves.

Yesterday while coming home from an errand, I saw swans flying overhead. There were swans in the fields too. At last, it feels like November is here.

According to the clerk in the Bow Post Office, she saw swans yesterday, so they were here on November 1.

Near where the swans were feeding, a flock of snow geese raised a ruckus. With all of them chatting at the same time, how do they know who is talking and who is saying what to whom? It seems worse than trying to carry on a conversation in a noisy restaurant. Is the loudest snow goose yelling at the others to shut up?

It is amazing that long before humans sailed the seas, bird brained creatures traversed everywhere. In Europe, humans feared dropping off the edge of the earth if they ventured too far out to sea. Bird brained albatross and boobies had no such fear. Unbound by fairy tales and superstitions, they took to flight and roamed the seas. Arctic terns flew back and forth from the Arctic to the Antarctic, a feat humans wouldn’t accomplish until recently.

Tens of millions of years before humans came into existence, birds filled the skies. They had all this how-to-navigate-the-globe figured out long before the first human began chiseling crude symbols into stone. If humans had listened to the birds, they wouldn’t have come up with the nonsense about falling off the edge of the world. Birds could have told us that there is no edge, that you just keep going round and round and round. We weren’t listening.

The nice thing about going to the post office on a bicycle is that you travel slow enough to see new things.

And see things that have always been there, in plain sight, but you’ve never seen before. It looks like the same ol’ same ol’ ditch I go by not far from home, but for some reason when I went by a few days ago, I saw something for the first time in the fifteen years I’ve been going by this ditch.

Sorrel. One bunch of sorrel after the other. Enough sorrel to make a thousand salads and soups. How did I not see this before? Someone didn’t come by this week and plant all this sorrel. From one seed many years ago, a sorrel took root in this ditch and spread. Maybe if I had gone by with my ears open too, I would have heard the sorrel calling, “We’re here! Down here! Look down here!”

It is the end of flowers, or so it seems. The time of flowers is closing. Just a few remain.

The lovely hydrangeas have gone to subtle leathery shades. By now a diligent gardener would have snipped them clean. “Cut them back and they’ll bloom better next year,” I’ve been admonished. But things dying have a gentle beauty of their own.

What is it like to be the last flower left?

To be the last petal clinging? To know that you are all that keeps the end of flowers from happening?

To take one last gasp and float down to oblivion?

It takes 225 to 250 million years for the sun to make one orbit around the galaxy. 125 million years or so from now, earthlings peering through telescopes will be looking at the other side of the galaxy.

Traveling at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to reach the other side. Or you could stay put on earth and get there in 125 million years. Though, since everything else is swirling around too, can you really say you are on the other side?

That far in the future, will anyone be noticing the ending of another season of flowers? I like to think so, though what will humans even be 125 million years from now?