When the first snow comes, some travellers, such as these sandhill cranes, have already flown before it for 3000 kilometres, for a week.
The first snow has this extension in time. When it comes, a week after driving the ancient cranes south, the little water bugs gather together in a circle and swim all night to keep the ponds from freezing around them. They make little moon flocks in the light. They go on like this for weeks, while all the light changes around them. Such a steady moon, lengthening summer into the cold.
The first snow has this extension in time. When it comes, the aspens collect the sun through its screen, amplify it in their leaves, and leap out. Ta da!
The spring has this extension, or spring, in time. When the trees grow older, when they are shore birches, they bow down and break, providing shelter and making way for new growth.
The spring has this extension in time. Humans? Ah, we look into the pool of memory.
And are conscious. Sad that our countries ask us to return to unconsciousness. Sad that we have to go. 33 kilometres later, during the second snowfall, we make it out to the highway.
And remain.
To come again. So does time erode around us.
Okanagan Okanogan 
Awesome, Harold!
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Hard to leave, but easy to come back!
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Oh, that little aspen and grasses in the snow! And the weighted boughs at the lake shore, nothing like a fresh, wet snow.
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Eight inches on September 7. Nice surprise! That was sure a cold morning in camp.
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(You could live in Calgary.) About aspen leaves. . . somewhere, some time I read that after watching white-tailed deer eating fallen leaves–pretty poor fare it seemed–the naturalist checked and found that it was the leaves closer to the soil that they were eating, not the crunchy corn flakes. A little checking showed that some of the leaves had ensiled and were high in protein. Free silage.
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Neat!
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