End of October...

It's been a mild, vibrantly colored autumn. The leaves are turning quite slowly - and quite brilliantly. Even the oaks are brighter and more colorful than I've noticed them being over the last few cycles. Most years they turn straight to tannin brown on the tree and hang there, looking dead, until January or later.


The oak leaves start turning russet, orange or gold on their tips and veins, before spreading to the rest of the leaf. I was in a nearly empty parking lot lined with burgandy oaks and brilliant scarlet maples and couldn't resist picking up several fistfuls of luminous color to bring home to press.


The sun is on its last autumnal legs. We still get a bit in the afternoons after it burns off the clouds and chill from the night before. Saturday afternoon I was gazing wistfully out of my studio window as the sun finally came out, and came to a most exciting realization - October has thirtyONE days, not thirty, so therefore, I had ONE more day for this round of sketches (LOADS more time than I had planned on!) so I trotted out to back yard for a couple of stolen hours and did a bit of fall-garden cleanup. My 10-foot tall Jerusalem artichokes were starting to fall over with the increasing winds - so I cut them down and replanted the tubers at their root. Next summer I ought to have enough come up to screen my whole fence! Yay. I pulled out lots of spent plants, and had just enough time to clean out the raspberry bed before it got too dark and chilly to tell the new canes from the old ones. Now I just need to top-dress all the beds with manure so that I can put them to bed for the winter. Well, maybe by next deadline...

With daylight savings now taking effect, there will be even less of that last-of-the-season, occasional sunshine. (Thank goodness for really good hot chocolate! And good books-on-tape to work by). I feel winter inexorably approaching...