There’s been snow in the air all day but no accumulation. It’s late October, so not this is not unusual but it has been kind of a weird autumn.
The trees started turning in September, then kind of stopped. Then some of them started again and peak color was a week or ten days later than usual but it wasn’t like a normal year’s peak. There was never a time when everything in town was a brilliantly lit by foliage. Some stayed green, some turned and some just let the color drain out, dried out and dropped off.
All the trees in my back yard did the latter. It was very disappointing. Our ash, which normally turns a spectacular burnt purple, dropped most of its leaves before they turned. The leaves that remained were just enough to taunt me with their glorious, plummy red. Then they fell. The maple trees, one of which normally turns orange and the other red, both just let the green drain out of them, leaving a sad, dry paleness behind. Now, the wind and rain are plucking them like weird chickens.
Josie came over for dinner and pumpkin carving last night. I made mac n cheese, our traditional Halloween dinner and she and Zack carved big pumpkins she’d picked up at Cub. I haven’t carved a pumpkin in nearly a decade. What can I say? The thrill of mucking out a big gourd and chopping a face into it is gone. I do enjoy the results of others’ work, though. The two pumpkin currently residing on my front steps will be chewed to bits by squirrels and rabbits long before Halloween actually arrives but we all had a good time.
One week ago, we painted in the Chaska ravine, hot in the sun. Today, I drove through sleet and snow flurries to paint inside.
I was mildly successful today but spent so much time trying to get the thing drawn correctly that I wasn’t able to push it very far. Oh, well.
I spent the afternoon working and watching desultory snowflakes flutter around in my back yard.
Jay was at a scrimmage so Zack and I had spaghetti for dinner and talked about whether or not people would still go to work if they knew the world would be destroyed by a meteorite in less than two years. That’s the premise of the book I’m reading right now.
It was a good day.