Welcome, Welcome Fall

     At last. Summer smothered and smouldered us long past her welcome. As if to make up for making us suffer, Autumn treated us to The Most Beautiful weekend. Fall is that perfect season in Virginia when the fields bloom with both asters and clover. There's a bit of Queen Anne's lace still blooming along with dandelion fluff balls. Summer and autumn intermingle as one passes on to the other. 

     There seems to be a bumper crop of black walnuts and hazelnuts falling from the trees. I can hear the large nuts hitting Mrs. Cahoon's barn and house roofs from over here. Inside her house, the sound of the drumming nuts onto her metal roof startle us while we visit, even though we know to expect them. Those black walnuts are so big that I worry about twisting an ankle when walking certain paths. I'll need to bring a rake up there and get them out of the way. The farmers cut their hay and the shorn fields now lay wide open to the sky. I invite Henri to walk more often than usual and he is happy to oblige. We aren't forced to follow a mowed path now that the fields are cut and we can explore more. Maybe wandering is a better word than explore. We wander. The air is certainly cooler and it's tempting to lie down on the grass where the breeze doesn't reach and soak up the sun's warmth. 

     We fed William's animals this weekend. This can either be a treat or a chore depending on the weather. This weekend it was a treat. The ducks are the most comical lot and it's easy to imagine Beatrix Potter's inspiration for writing her amusing animal stories just by watching those ducks. The sheep will follow anywhere for grain and the cows were behaving nicely, although the newest bull is a little stand offish. He looks like Ferdinand the Bull. He's black and his bony haunches are high and he carries himself the the Ferdinand character is drawn. He didn't want to follow the other bull and cows along the path to their dinner or breakfast so I suggested to Steve that he take the riding crop and shoo him in. Surprisingly, Steve did just that, except that the bull kept evading him and it turned into a chase game. Steve was having none of that nonsense and quickly gave up. How I wished I had my phone or camera to capture Steve chasing the bull around the field.

    Somehow the days flow busily along with work and chores and play... in that order. There's still more canning to be done, rug hooking continues, and we have a project Steve is working on in the basement, semi-finishing a space where the grandchildren can play indoors. It's a dusty, messy job that created a lot of fine cement dust all over everything, even with plastic put up. Thankfully we're past that part now and it's almost time to paint. We gave ourselves a Christmas deadline when we expect everyone to be here. I think we're on schedule, however keeping this perspective is challenging in light of the book I'm currently reading,  "Living Life Backwards" by David Gibson. (Thanks to a friend for the recommendation.) 

"The seasons and natural cycles of the world are content to come and go, but we sweat and toil to make believe that it will not be so with us."