It seems like I just wrote a Journal entry – wait, I did, on Tuesday after we got back from our trip to Tennessee. Not much has happened since then. Or maybe it just seems that way after coming home from a five day trip.
It’s been chilly, sometimes windy, sometimes rainy, often frosty. Very autumnal. The trees are mostly bare. The gardens are mostly empty. Now I’ve switched from planning every minute to be outside working in the gardens to being inside planning next year’s gardens. I tend my houseplants, read seed catalogs, and dream of gardens yet to sprout. I think it’s going to be a long winter.
We’re at that time of year when, with the trees bare of leaves, it seems brighter. When the maples are bare there’s no real shade in the yard anymore and the sun floods the house with light through the eastern windows in the mornings. But the sunlight, though brighter, is weaker. It always looks warmer than it is now.
There’s still a bit of color to be seen, but it’s scarce and subtle. In my yard all of the big trees are bare, but on the little oaks out in the meadow that I planted from acorns the leaves are still a deep rusty red. In the long flower bed, the stonecrops (a gift from my Aunt Esther Rathfon many years ago) are on their last legs but still pretty with faded chartreuse leaves and dusty pink flowers. On the hill above Gold and in various places around the county, the needles of the larch trees have turned butterscotch yellow. Soon the needles will fall and the hills will be brown until spring.
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| Leaves on the little oaks in the meadow. |
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| Frosty stonecrops. |
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| The larch trees above Gold. |
On Thursday we did our annual clean up of the Raymond Cemetery. Our family has done this every year for the last 14 years or so. We remove all the flags and the flowers from the graves to get the cemetery ready for winter.
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| Cleaning up Raymond Cemetery. |
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| Cleaning up Raymond Cemetery. |
Yesterday was Halloween and we observed it in our usual manner. We bought the kind of candy that we like and ate it all ourselves while watching our traditional Halloween movie, E.T. We never get trick-or-treaters. We’re too far out in the boondocks. We like it that way. We don’t usually waste pumpkins on making jack o’lanterns, but I had a bunch of little compost pumpkins that turned out to be more decorative than edible and I let Hannah and Josiah carve them up. They came up with some clever and creative faces.
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| Carving pumpkins. |
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| Our jack o'lanterns on Halloween. |
Josiah presented his senior project last week and passed. His project was a written report and media presentation of his time on the work crew at the Hill Cumorah Pageant. He also submitted his senior picture to the yearbook. More items to check off on the countdown list to graduation. It seems strange to think that this is last time we’ll be doing these things.
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| Josiah' senior picture. |
We have some new neighbors, animal neighbors, that is. A fox has moved in somewhere close by. We see him often in the Blake’s yard and along the far edge of the orchard. You may remember the trouble we had with a fox raiding our chicken coop earlier this year. That fox had to be killed to protect our flock. I don’t think this new fox will be a problem, though. He has a mangled front paw that makes him limp. We only see him in areas far from our barn. I don’t think he could climb the coop fence or dig under it with his damaged paw. Since foxes prey mostly on voles, mice, rabbits, and chipmunks, I’m more than happy to have him hang around – as long as he stays away from the chickens.
With the gardens tilled for winter, it’s easy to see footprints in the soft soil – and there are lots of them and some of them are surprising. There are deer prints crisscrossing the gardens and flowerbeds all around the house. And out in the orchard there are deer droppings and places where I can see they’ve rested in the tall grass. The odd thing is, we’ve never seen any deer in our yard. Deer are not welcome on my property. They damage the fruit trees. When the garden is growing they eat things they shouldn’t. I’ll have to devise some deterrents for them.
It’s November now. The year is almost over. Despite it being a rather unlovely month, I like November. We’ll probably get our first big snow this month unless the forecasters are right and the El Niño (that's Spanish for The Niño) out in the Pacific Ocean keeps us warmer than usual. We can only hope. Some of my favorite people were born in November – my sister Mindy on the 9th (she would have been 53 this year), my adorable granddaughter Ellie on the 12th (she’ll be 4), and my darling daughter Hannah on the 26th (she’ll be 20!). Hannah’s birthday is on Thanksgiving Day this year so it’s like a High Holiday for us. There are other birthdays as well, nieces and nephews and others. And Rachel and Tabor were married on the 26th (this will be their 4th anniversary). There’s so much to celebrate in November.
