Warm Days, Chilly Nights, and Football!

We're embarking upon my favorite time of the year. I see hints of color in the trees on our mountain, the school bus takes the children to school each morning and their dogs doze in the sun waiting for that yellow bus to reappear. Meanwhile it's quiet, or would be except that we adults are busy catching up on our yard work and we have a crew finishing up a section of stone wall along the front of our property.

We sleep soundly these chilly nights with the bedroom windows open to take full advantage. I fall asleep listening to the chirp, hum and buzz of crickets, katydids, and cicadas, and occasionally the loud twang of a bullfrog in our pond who sounds like a bass guitar with a broken string. Looking up, I can see a quadrillion stars despite the security light on our outbuilding. There isn't much night traffic on our country road; it's the best time to live here. Oh, we might get a rare whiff of a skunk passing through or hear the snarl of an animal or the cough of a startled deer, but mostly it is just peaceful.

During the day our only problem is gnats who seem to be having a last fling before cold weather. Otherwise it's pleasant getting the bushes all trimmed and catching up with the work we had to let slide during this unusually wet summer. The flower garden has to be cleaned up as well and the netting taken down from the blueberry bushes. There is always plenty to do to fill the days outside before we hunker down for the cold winter.

My husband has been cutting the fields. He won't let me drive the tractor, much as I would like to, and he was too busy earlier to brushhog the fields. Now it's looking very nice; almost like an extension of our lawn. I'm too busy to cut the fields anyway; I have a section of stone wall to repair thanks to a woodchuck who burrowed into loose stones in the middle of it. I also need to do something about a forsythia bush that was damaged in a storm and trim the rose bushes.

I intend to post some pictures of our beautiful new stone wall and our property but I'm an old geezer who still uses a 35 mm camera and has the pictures developed so you'll have to wait until I finish the roll of film. I don't have a cell phone or a digital camera - still live in the stone age.

I'm not really a country person having grown up in a midwestern city. Actually when we moved here 14 years ago it was my first experience with living in the country. As you can see, though, I have enjoyed many aspects of life in the country, things I will miss when the day comes that we must leave here. Changes come very gradually to this area so even though there is more traffic, more houses, and far fewer working farms, it is still "the countryside."