They call them kettles, those soaring loose clusters of turkey vultures that stir the sky. The autumn sky is like a great inverted kettle that fills with leaves, and blackbirds, and Cessnas, and all manner of transient aerial stuff laboring to stay aloft in its own particular way. But above it all are the turkey vultures, convecting effortlessly upwards through the atmosphere like bubbles in a slow simmer.

From here below, their days look like bliss, gliding for hours on end without a wingbeat, maintaining lift and stability at lower altitudes by canting their wings upward in a dihedral V, teetering left and right, then riding corkscrew thermal elevators to the penthouse without so much as the twitch of a muscle.

Up there, turkey vultures are graceful and majestic. Down here, however, they are hideous, graceless, even revolting.

These days the newspaper arrives before the sun does in the morning, and the vales emerge from their fog-bank covers long after everybody else is up and at ‘em. And somehow, this annual tilt by our world toward darkness has tripped a switch deep in my amygdala, the brain’s seat of emotions, memories, and fear, creating an intense urge to replace the wicker on our back porch with cordwood.

Kate and I have already made three trips to Blue Jay Orchards for cider and doughnuts and have begun to stack books on the coffee table for those long winter nights. The chimneys are clean and a few sweaters have emerged from an attic chest smelling of cedar. It’s time.

Most of the wood I will need this winter is stacked outside, seasoned for 18 months or more, ready and waiting to give up all that solar energy stored in cellulose for the sake of our cozy comfort through the months of cold and darkness.

A month from now, autumn’s firestorm of color will be consuming our woodlands. But if you look closely now, you may be lucky enough to see how the fiery season’s fuse is lit.

Cardinal flowers stand like matches in the seeping rills of early September, their feet in the cool water and their heads burning hot red against the flagging greens of summer’s retreat. The color is so intense that even “cardinal” seems a pale adjective for the flower.

While increasingly rare in the wild, this brilliant native plant becomes the center of attention in whatever favored landscape it arises — especially for hummingbirds.

Folklore has it that cardinal flowers have the ability to pull hummingbirds right out of the sky. Their crimson calling card and rich nectar reward for passing hummers make that assertion nearly true.