A Most Beautiful Fall

Is it my imagination, or was this fall the most beautiful one we have had in years? As I write this, it is the last week in October, and so many colored leaves are still hanging on. Our old Japanese maple in the backyard is really putting on a show with its leaves turning a fuchsia red, as if it knew that was my favorite color.

Jack Frost has nipped us lightly a few nights, but even he seems to be holding off. I can still sit on our screened porch in the afternoon and read with the sun warming my shoulders.

And the sky! Has it always been this blue? I know we need rain, and it will come, but it is such a treat to be able to take walks with just a light jacket, and work in the yard comfortably. I got carried away after reading Rea Duncan's gardening column on making a little wild English garden in one corner to gaze into next summer. Clutching her column, I rushed right down to White Flower Farm's fall sale, and filled a wagon with over a dozen perennials.

Unlike the black loam at White Flower, our backyard soil is damp clay, leavened by big shards of broken sewer pipe left by the sewer commission's many passes through. So I am out there slamming away with my post hole digger, trying to make proper resting places for these heretofore pampered plants. Meanwhile, my back is telling me that if I don't cut out the nonsense, I won't see spring, never mind the plants.

Winter is coming, but I am really trying to enjoy Mother Nature's gifts to us this fall. Maybe I am romanticizing, but it seems like she is trying to make up for the bad things human nature did to us recently.