Gold and Red

October, with its slanted light, gives our normal landscape metallic powers: silver at twilight, golden throughout. Painters paint it, writers write it, all of us taking our time with a mental photograph of something beautiful and vast.

Not a lady, not a singular dancing man on your 2-inch screen, it is not easy to record. You must find the colors or the words to capture a whole planet under a unique sky, turning, like a top — we hope, a perpetual top — through the universe.

Soon after sunrise, coming upon the spent sunflowers, the flock of goldfinch rise and head for the branches of the big elm tree. No longer in breeding plumage, the birds would be golden in name only were it not for October’s light. Here, each of the birds is back-lit by the sun, and as they lift from the darkness of bent flower heads the sculpt of their flight is recorded by the blur of so many tinged feathers. They glow a deeper shade of gold, turning the space all around each one gold, too.

Here we have no precious metal. Nothing to fight over or build temples out of. Only the glowing tone is something to stop you, capture your eye, like a pricey ring is wont to do.

Gold can be found in other unexpected places, like the plot of heirloom corn drying down. It’s spindly, a little frail, but its leaves and its stalk, each papery package, is pure gold in mid-morning’s warmth.

We section our fields in order to avoid endemic pests or disease. We try not to have too much of one thing in one place, and we are keen on providing habitat.

There is a long strip, a harvest drive, between the corn and the cole crops, where the summer buckwheat has re-seeded and extended bloom into fall, essentially carpeting the path. I consider the difference between the red carpet rolled out and this golden one, just an agricultural happenstance.

Dragonflies have spent the night sheltering in the corn, and now, by the hundreds, they leave their roosts. Maybe too sleepy to address the fuller sky, too heavy with moisture, they rise only slightly and for a few moments they stay low, their squadron spreading into the corn’s immediate shade.

I stop to watch because as they hover and imperceptibly stay aloft, they pass through shafts of sunlight, and the magnitude of four wings, each no more than filigree capturing the light, fascinates like any bauble.