Some rode backward on the current, perhaps engaged in conversation with those facing ahead. Always there were several who dove, fast and fluid as fish, disappearing just long enough to be gone before suddenly being afloat on the surface again.

Then the bright clouds opened and they lifted off, heading west, then north, then east, a hundred buffleheads aloft in one circle.

They came back around, sunlit now, the snowy fields and barns shining behind them across the water, while beneath them the color of the lake turned from grey to green.

November can sometimes hurry into December, but here is a portal into another kind of time. I am so happy that I remember how to slip through.