Trees of green, gold, red, brown, orange & yellow.

We are well into October and the trees are showing all of their vibrant, beautiful colours. Hard not to stare when you catch a face full of colours with a brilliant blue sky behind it. Last evening the clouds were lit by the setting sun, and all of that pillowy softness looked like a painting. Those brief moments where you see something that makes you feel really good about things, is hard to beat. Like the first sip of coffee for some in the morning. The cool crispness of an ice cold beer on a hot day. The startling rush of cool lake water when you first jump in. Brief. Exhilarating. Makes all the other shit float away for a moment. Hard to beat.

One of my hardest life lessons was realizing that those were the moments, few that they can be at times, that really make everything else worthwhile. Having career wins, family life wins, hobby wins mixed in means you can get more of the good stuff, if you know where to look, and what to place a priority on. But I’m getting sentimental.

Saturday is here. The rain has stopped. The sun is peeking out through the clouds a tiny bit. I see a whole lot of leaves I’m going to need to get to. I’m glad we finally had all that rain recently, as it knocked a bunch of the leaves down. If I had my way I’d make all of our leaves fall over a single week so that I just had to do one full day of leaf mulching, bagging, and spreading onto the gardens. Instead of every few says over a months time. Bah! Plus I need dry leaves for my mulcher vacuum to work properly. So the rain means I have to wait. Oh well.

I will have to dig up the Dahlias and Glads before too much longer. Dry those off and store them in the basement for next spring. That’s when we will get a true sense of just how many the squirrels and chipmunks have dug up and eaten over the course of the year. Bastards.

You have to figure that 20 plus days of no rain in September will affect the quality of colours in the leaves. But, miraculously enough, I’m still seeing all of the usual colours out in the wild. I was sure we’d get mostly browns this year. But a very rainy June, July, August seems to have solved that for us this year. So what do I know. The grass looks how I thought the trees would be. Crunchy. Brown. Ugly. Anybody’s guess at this point.