REPORT: OCTOBER 20, 2020

Dark clouds over Buck Mountain.

It will rain.

More sugar-maple leaves on the ground than on the trees.

The oaks and popples are turning.

Soybean fields amber, hay fields cut and green.

Luke’s old milking shed is falling apart.

It’s just a storage shed now,

with the old SURGE and AG JOURNAL signs rusting on the wall

and the little lightning rods standing bravely on the roof.

Last year, a young man took the bend in the road too fast

and the laws of physics being what they are,

he glanced off a telephone pole and ran into the shed.

And died. One of the dead

elms has fallen. Now it’s raining,

and taking pity on the dog, I turn.

Sumac is mostly red along the east side of the road.

If it were colder, I’d swear it was snowing in the mountains.

Jim’s VETERANS AGAINST TRUMP flag is up on his porch.

At the far end of her pasture, his old horse Molly crops the grass.