Bright sun, clear sky, little wind. Barometer high. Hard frost last night.

The big show is almost ended by the first hard frosts. Although the tall grasses provide an encore with their rich burst of golds, winey russets, and shades of bronze, the great host of prairie flowers now exists only as dried stalks with stripped seed heads, and a few pods clinging to frost-blighted stems. Then even the grasses begin to bleach and fade; the prairie is assuming winter dress, a sere monotone with all life gone underground to await another spring.
The wreckage of the great vegetative tides still functions in behalf of the prairie biota — providing deep forms and snug coverts for the foxes and coyotes, prairie chickens, quail, pheasants, rabbits and hares and meadow mice, and all the beleaguered little critters that must stay awake through the winter and so desperately need shelter from the sharpening, never-ending wind.
Nothing has been wasted; nothing has really died or gone. The prairie pendulum has swung to one limit, and has already begun to return, and in a few bleak months there will be pasqueflowers again.
Where the Sky Began, John Madson