The equinox has come— 12 hours of day and 12 of night— as if Vermont were in the tropics. The little brown dogs (LBDs) and I sit on the old velvet couch, which in an earlier life, was red, but has since faded to mauve, and is slouching towards the earth.

Just then, we hear what sounds like an invasion of spring peepers, only to look out upon a mixed foraging flock of little brown and golden birds picking seeds from the tops of goldenrods, fussing at each other in the fruit trees, tumbling through the yard. There is a poetry to the phrase, mixed foraging flocks, and I recite it whenever the wild birds come through in fall — chickadees, juncos, sparrows, vireos, kinglets, goldfinches, and the flashy little golden buttocks of yellow rumped warblers. After a summer of territorial battles, mating, nesting, and feeding young, the birds are now flying with whatever little passerines join their group — gorging, fattening up for the long journey ahead to the south or for staying up north.

I ripped out thorny brambles and planted native perennials on our hillside last fall, leaving the goldenrods and milkweeds, and am now drinking in the yellows and purples of rudbeckias, coreopsis, helianthus and asters. The reddest reds of wild crabapples and hawthorns sing holiday time. Sugar maples, just senescing, are losing chlorophyll, showing the orange that was hiding there all along. The riverbanks are coated in warm brown with fallen leaves. A kingfisher screams and flies just above, skimming the water and rocks, tempting gravity.

We sit on the porch and watch the seasons roll by as if perched before the big screen of life. The color explosion of October doesn’t last long. One good hard, cold rain and we’ve gone grey and white for months. In May, when we are so tired of monochrome, the little yellow-green tree buds let us know we’ve survived another winter. Then on to a hundred shades of green in July. A landscape painter friend of mine who found summer painting in Vermont a challenge, used to wail, “Enough green, please, god!” The cones in our eyes never grow jaded up north. But fall comes again, and we’re back to another round.

Some find the end of summer a sad time — shorter days, birds leaving, flowers fading. I am reminded that decay is just a necessary stage of change. Our fall foliage colors, famous throughout the world, only happen because our hardwood trees cut off nutrients to the leaves to go dormant. There is no orange and red fall foliage display in the tropics.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” reflects on the messiness of transformations. When cutting open a chrysalis, one does not find a beautiful little baby butterfly, but a rotting caterpillar. She recalls the stories of immigrants from “civilized” cultures, who after a very difficult period of transformation, grew to prefer their lives with the natives. The Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, wandered, naked and barefoot throughout the south for nine years, in search of his tribe, to go back to Spain. By the time he and his small group of men walked from Florida to Mexico, they had become enslaved and escaped several times and had been helped and taught by tribes along the way. He became a survivor, a healer, a part of the indigenous culture that he and his group had come to conquer and to enslave. When he finally arrived in Mexico and encountered his own people, he was repulsed. He had become the beautiful butterfly.

I used to be a visual artist, a painter of landscapes and rivers and farm animals. But I realized that I was so busy representing nature as an artifact, one that needed to be packaged and sold so I could buy more materials, that I had failed to look deeply. I didn’t need to paint nature; it was already there, in perfect beauty. I felt an urge to study the plants and animals and rocks that had posed for me for so many years and see what they really are.

People from my past seem mournful that I have changed, as if change were a sign of loss rather than a joyful rebirth. Yet, with my eyes wide open, hiking the woods with the LBDs, listening to birdsong, crawling around on the ground, examining liverworts, mosses and ferns, I seem happy. Not a butterfly, yet, but on the way.

Micki Colbeck is a naturalist and writer and chair of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com