Somebody's Watching the Calendar

I asked Alan to hold my camera and he asked me to smile

Normally the equinox passes without much involvement from the weather. The sky does not keep a calendar.

However, yesterday, the last day of summer, was gloriously summery. Even late in the evening when the sun was nearly gone from the sky, the air was balmy and soft, almost liquid with sweet, gentle warmth. A really nice day for Sundae on the Farm and a nice day for birding and such. Alan sat with me on the porch for a while, just talking and watching the catbirds and phoebes fly by. 

Made for a sweetly poignant end to summer. 

Then this morning we awoke to cold, scudding clouds, and bristly winds, raking the seed heads of the done-for-the-year rudbeckia, and tossing the cottonwood like a champ. The sky was lit from before dawn until the sun was high with the weirdest light you could imagine.

It was a nearly perfect segue from summer to fall, with no interval at all in between.

The late blight, which has decimated nearly everyone's tomatoes, has finally come herre. I can't complain, as we have picked a lot of tomatoes, but I hate to see the end of the harvest. Homemade sauce is such an asset in the winter. I season it when I make it, with fresh herbs off our plants, which I chop right up in the food processor with the tomatoes. Then when we add it to spaghetti sauce or soup in the winter, there is a taste of summer in every bite.

And with the cold and wild, wet wind comes inertia. I need to do stuff.

I don't want to.