The mellow purples and yellows have bled into the landscape along the edges and in the heart of wetlands while the white cemetery hydrangeas have blossomed and small, green, windblown apples are scattered on the ground below their trees. I know. I’ve been throwing them daily into the Green River for the dogs to retrieve, the pets getting washed and cooled in the process. They eventually eat the bitter fruit after carrying it around for a while and seem to enjoy it.

As for the beechnuts and butternuts I’ve been observing on my rambles, they’re still clinging to their branches, the spiky beechnut husks browning in the hot summer sun. I picked one Wednesday, split it, removed the husk, bit into the three-sided nut, and found the meat still green. I think it’ll soon be white. Then I’ll eat it. As for the butternuts, well, a friend has encouraged me to gather them when they drop, then lay them out to dry on my haymow floor. I’m not sure I will. Maybe if I get bored. He says they’re a lot of work but delicious; likely nutritious, too. We’ll see.

What the aforementioned signs tell me is that I’ll soon be throwing seven cords of firewood into the woodshed, a rite of late summer and fall for me. A proud, hardy New Englander, I actually look forward to autumn and do not in any way dread the approach of winter, a time for reading, writing and thinking, even occasional mischief, always happy to step outside and fill my lungs with cold, refreshing air that seems to clear the head with one deep, lusty breath and vaporized exhalation. But that’s still months away. Today, I want to report a Saturday-morning visit from a neighbor who brought interesting news.

There are apparently big cats in my neighborhood, a cougar among them. That’s right, a cougar. My friend says many people have seen the long-tailed beast around Meadow View Farm on Smead Hill, where I watched a flock of about 10 mature wild turkeys feeding through the pasture Tuesday; among them a long-bearded tom, his pastel-reddish head glowing in the noontime sun. I was there to chat with the lady farmer who toots her horn, waves and smiles in passing on her daily rounds. I was looking forward to speaking to her — one of the identified big-cat witnesses — because I have always found her cow barn to be a great place for lively banter, most often about wildlife sightings and neighborhood gossip, both useful to a man like me. I knew I would not find a reluctant, taciturn soul. No sir. The farmers atop the hill are my kind of folks, and we’ve had many spirited conversations over the years, be it in their homes, barnyards, fields or manure-stained runways between milking stalls.

You gotta love dairy farmers, especially those of the fairer sex, all a vanishing breed, none the least bit squeamish about slop and stench. They’re real people who know what life’s about, even if many of them still do vote Republican. Can you blame them? They’re just following the tradition of their great-great grandfathers from the days of Lincoln, then Reconstruction. Oh, how that Grand Old Party has changed since then, though; so much so that Honest Abe must be nauseous from rolling in his grave since his proud party became that of the intolerant, fanatical South. But let us not digress. Back to the story at hand, that of the neighborhood big cat.

As I broke through the Meadow View barn threshold into the milking parlor and skirted the first row of Jerseys, maybe five of them, I received the same friendly smile and greeting I have there grown accustomed to. I looked at the lady placing a milk bucket or some other contraption under a cow and said, “Well, I imagine you know why I’m here.”

“No, why?”

“I’m chasing a rumor. Word has it you’ve been seeing a big cat.”

“Nope, not me. Seems I’m the only one who hasn’t seen it. My brother did. He was amazed at the length of the tail. Neighbors on both sides of me have seen it, too, one of them way down by you. All I’ve seen is a bobcat running off with one of my chickens in its mouth. I think it’s a mother feeding her kittens. I used to have 38 chickens. I’m down to 18.”

That bit of information immediately corrected one inaccurate rumor. I had been told she saw the cougar running off with her chicken. Uh-uh. It just displays once more time how unreliable stories passed by word of mouth can be. It doesn’t matter in the big picture, though, because the rest of the tales checked out, sort of. A big cat is indeed the talk of that northern hilltop overlooking Greenfield’s Meadows.

I had been immediately interested in my Saturday visitor’s story because it was not the first one I’d heard recently about a cougar roaming my neighborhood. Another neighborhood farmer had approached me about a sighting more than a month ago, a day or two after I had reported in this space about a cougar being hit and killed by a car in the early hours of June 11 on a Milford, Conn., highway. A day or two after that story hit the street, a woman traveling Brook Road at a site than a mile west of my home had seen a cougar “clear as day” cross in front of her vehicle. She stepped on her brake to avoid hitting it, then thought about calling me but decided not to. She didn’t want people to think she was cuckoo. From the location of that sighting to Meadow View is less than a mile as the crow flies or the wildcat walks. So this most recent report made a lot of sense to me, got me wheels spinning. Add to that the fact that there have been many cougar sightings between the Mohawk Trail and Smead Hill over the 14 years I’ve lived in the Meadows, so, obviously, my interest piqued.

On the other hand, I knew cougar-sighting reports were bound to increase after our first New England road-kill, followed by the admission that the dead cat was not an escaped pet, as the experts had hoped. Nope. It was a real, live, wildcat that had traveled all the way from South Dakota. Given that, I figured people would be emboldened to report future sightings. Then this.

To me, these latest sightings are with the realm of possibility even if the animal doesn’t show up dead on a local highway. But that’s just me. Who knows? Maybe I too am a little cuckoo.

If the big cat is indeed lurking near my home, I sure do hope it doesn’t get the twin fawns a friend and neighbor is enjoying these days in his backyard. He says he’s been watching them feed with their mother in and around his vegetable garden for a month. Bloodstains in the broccoli would not be welcome. He’s cool about the deer munching on his garden, says there’s more than enough for him and them. My guess is that he’d prefer the cougar eats elsewhere.