Fall colours are everywhere. And suddenly, whoops! it  isn't fall anymore. We've back-tracked to summer. Just like that. Our furnace has been set to 'on' for the past few weeks, the air conditioner packed away for another year and goodness gracious we no longer need heat pumped through the house. The past few days have been redolent of summer and that's that. No need for light jackets as we roam through the forest.

Last night around midnight we were out briefly in the backyard with Jackie and Jillie. Last minute preparations to go up to bed. Look up at the stars, we're urged, don't miss the displays of heavenly bodies. So, we often do just that, on clear evenings. Last night was one such evening. Our reward was to be surprised by the sight of an unusual moon. It shimmered and shone in the dark night sky and its colour was decidedly on the red spectrum.

A blood moon. So we conjectured why that should be. And realized that the intense, wide-spread wildfires burning through the forests of the U.S.Pacific Coast, in Oregon, Washington State and California have sent plumes of dense smoke into the atmosphere that rise and rise and keep rising. And they've occluded the atmosphere. Which accounts for that phenomenon of the moon shining through a red cast.

Blood moons are supposed to appear before an eclipse of the moon. But they can appear when there is sufficient dust and smoke in the atmosphere to create that same phenomenon. It is said by some who believe in Biblical prophecy that a blood moon signals the oncoming 'end of times'. And there's a certain strangeness to this; who might have imagined a year ago that the world would go into a social, physical lockdown in an effort to evade the potential of a deadly virus contaminating vast populations, resulting in the deaths of countless numbers of people?

Good thing most of us are not superstitious. That we can look about us and marvel at the vicissitudes of natural phenomena in a world where we are just a part of an interdependent whole. And on a more pragmatic, rational level understand that nature is sometimes at war with itself, and sometimes humanity is dragged into becoming a part of that war. We're affected by the presence of deadly bacteria and toxic moulds and viruses with which we learn to live in the sense of protecting ourselves from their excesses.

And then we go on to marvel at nature's other side, the one that provides us with spectacular visions of its capacity to bedazzle on the strength of its clockwork blueprint of existence. Where right now there are other colours, signifying nature's dedication to rest and renewal as our world makes its journey around the sun and we're gradually exposed to less warmth and weaker light, shorter daylight hours and the influx of new weather systems.

Today, as it happens, we have a 26C day, where last week we were experiencing night-time frosts when the thermometer flirted with -1C and our gardens were touched with frost. Today, a hefty wind blows warm, moist air throughout the atmosphere, the sun is blazing in a wide blue sky, and rain is nowhere in sight. The forest that we idyll through while remarking to one another how beautiful the new rainbow displays of vegetation are, feasting our eyes on nature's peerless palette is steadily moving toward mid-fall when even the last of the wildflowers will no longer bloom.

Already, fallen leaves and pine needles are littering the forest floor, and we're beginning to swish through the foliage, bright and crisp underfoot.