falling into the season

It passed right by and I did not feel a thing.

The first day of fall.

The cycle of seasons always make for good blog fodder. Four essays each year are just there for the plucking. And I wasted one. Instead of talking about the crisp air and autumn leaves, I was yammering on about the banana plague headed our way(don't slip on that peel).

Well, the part about crisp air and autumn leaves just does not happen here. We are at the height of our Very Wet and Hot season that has very little to do with spiced cider and afternoon football games. The first day of any season is a bit hard to detect in this neck of the woods.

The only real sign that Earth is on its constant route around the sun is our slightly diminished day length. I say "slightly" because Barra de Navidad is not Svalbard where the sun will soon disappear from the sky.

Because we are much closer to the equator at 19 degrees north than at Prineville's 44 degrees (where I just spent two weeks on an aborted mission), the days still seem relatively long to me. Even though both Barra and Prineville now have just over 12 hours of sunlight each day, Barra will gain the edge with each passing day until the balance swings in Prineville's favor around the first day of Spring next year. The swing, of course, is far more radical for those of you who call The Great White North home.

Yesterday, a reader and Facebook friend, Gayla Pierce, announced she had pulled out her astrological charts as part of her neighborhood Autumnal Equinox party. (She lives in California.) I told her, if I had thought of it, I would have sacrificed a couple doves to read their entrails. But that struck me as far too Shakespearean.

Apparently, the bird population took umbrage at my avian humor. I was sitting in the patio this morning reading the newspaper. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a bit of movement. When I looked up, there were fifteen or twenty black vultures, who nightly roost in the antenna beside my house, circling over me -- wheeling as if they were a squadron of bombers returning from a raid on Ploiești.

That is them in the photograph at the top of this essay. Or, rather, that is some of them. Trying to capture the entire group would have left them nigh invisible in a photograph.

But the message was clear. "You got a really nice house here. It would be a shame if someone dropped a drying cat corpse in your pool."

And that is why I am not going to share with you what I think is the obvious solution to the overpopulation of wild horse herds in the American West. (I was reading a newspaper article on that particular problem when I noticed the vultures. Nature does ape art in sardonic ways.)

I am not going to share my pony thought thoughts based on the instruction of that wise philosopher Mr. Spock: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end."
I do take some lessons to heart -- even if they are only another day on the calendar.