The Seasons

        I am a person who still enjoys living where there are 4 seasons.  Around here it has been fall as usual, putting up apple juice, drying, did some great apple syrup, jelly, pie in a bottle. Plums were plentiful, both wild and domestic varieties. Grass kept growing, always needing mowed, weeds doing well. Garden, tomatoes, have been good this year, perhaps a little small in size this year.  

         For some reason, not complaining, the box elder bugs have been less this fall.  Generally they are covering the southeast side of our house and getting in every crevice and open spot they can find.  It has been nice to have their reduced amount, would that it could last for a few years.  The wasps, too, have not been as obnoxious or thick.  I am sure a farmers almanac could answer these wonderings of mine.

     It has been a strange fall season.  Nice temperatures longer than usual.  The hay fields busy growing a 4th crop weeks after the haying equipment has been cleaned up and put to rest in the shed.  Leaves staying green, along with the grass and the fields.  Deer out munching on the fresh alfalfa instead of raiding the storage in the barn.

      Now, November, the leaves have finally come down.  The whole community is carpeted with yellow and gold.  We have had quite a bit of rain, but no snow until the end of last week, and then it was only a skiff.  The first morning the white clung to the roofs, the fence posts, the upper side of the orchard branches, but the ground was too warm and no white appeared.  The next day the skiff arrived, but gone by noon easily.  Our mountaintops are staying white but the snow line didn't move down until last night.   

         Dark comes early now with Daylight Savings Time taking a rest.  With the dark came big feathery flakes, floating earthward.  They kept coming until everything was covered nicely and then the silence reigned, adding to the feeling of softness.  It is time for the change of the season, time for the flakes to fall and nourish the ground.  Not an easy season for man and beast, domestic or wild, but one that should be welcomed.  It is all part of the plan of our existence.