Reading as many blogs as I do has the subtle effect o
f making me want to bring my neighborhood in line with the music that autumn plays in most other places. For example, I found a November poem that is all about the violent wind, when we usually have to wait a month or two later for that sort of thing. It didn’t fit with my reality.
It’s definitely Fall here, but our notes sing a quieter background harmony, linking us more obviously to summer. Even the window art at the grocery store is mostly sunflowers to go with the pumpkins and turkeys.
All of the pictures from my garden were taken on this sixth day of November. A strawberry is ripe, as “ripe” as ornamentals get, but is decorated by a few of the telltale fallish pine needles that are slowly covering everything in that part of the yard.
The sign for the orange cherry tomato is hiding deep under the exploding foliage, and I can’t remember if it is a Sungold or a Sunsugar, but the fruit is still ripening, and nearly as sweetly as a month ago.
Mr. Glad stopped us on the way to Vespers last week to take this picture of clouds in a blue sky. Not rain clouds, sad to say. The grass has that November look, from having dried up and then been rained on a little, not enough to create any new green color. Our autumn is drier than usual, which is a hard kind of gentleness.
The furnace has been turned on, which means that we keep the windows closed, though with the days mild, and the air so fresh and soothing, I wish we could have them open. I just have to go fully out of doors if I want to get into the natural atmosphere.
It’s still not really cold enough to have a wood fire, and we haven’t had a frost yet, as you can tell from the tomatoes.
These are the hens and chicks near the new planting bed out front. I set out all the new ground-cover starts this week, and some of the thyme is blooming still.
October is the month to plant peas of any sort, and this year I bought sweet pea (those are the flowers) and snow pea seeds, but I never got around to actually putting them in the ground, which means that the failed flowering fennel and the nasturtiums are free to paint an impressionistic scene. The background music is called “Flowery Fall.”
the drought, no one of the thousands of people in attendance seemed to mind the rain one bit. Several speakers at the ceremony mentioned it as an extra blessing and even thanked the rain as well as every human participant. Mr. Glad and I were here in our town watching some of the festivities on the computer and we left the door open to the back yard so we could hear the rain. Everything smells fresh and fallish.
didn’t mind the rain, either.
The zinnias are putting on their final show pre-frost. This one pink bush has been the biggest producer of blooms, and has converted me from my former stance against this color of zinnias. The flowers look even nicer and last longer now that they don’t have the sun beating down directly overhead. (The picture also shows a few of the gazillion redwood needles that fall in our yard from the tree over the fence day after day and demand our attention.)
As of yesterday morning I still had not prepared the soil for my new planting out front, and I knew the rain was coming and would gum up our adobe soil again for who knows how long. So I put aside all the indoor tasks and began to hack at the brick-like dirt with my shovel, hoping just to get some bags of compost mixed into the clay before the showers began last night.
It feels good to have our favorite baseball team playing in the World Series, and as I type the San Francisco Giants are playing the third game against the Kansas City Royals. I come over to the computer during the commercials and sometimes also when I am too nervous watching the Royals at bat.
from the pool somehow feels fallish to me, and is very relaxing, as I listen to the blip-blip of the water, and make things tidier there. Even though the afternoons have been hot, you can tell that it’s not summer, maybe because the rays of the sun are coming at a slant so the heat is less direct.
repared to spend a bundle to buy a crowd of them with which to make a mountain on our dead lawn, though this would be the year of opportunity!
