Waxing and Waning

As summer wanes inexorably into fall, progress on our garden shed waxes toward completion. Summer has completed its mission for this year of 2009, giving us great pleasure in the process. Leaving us as compassionately and gradually as it can, itself unwilling to entirely relinquish its all-too-brief hold on the summer equinox in this Western Hemisphere. That's the thing about the inevitable, there is no holding it back.

Our entry into the ravine this early afternoon was nothing out of the ordinary. Last night's several rain events - one of which was a substantial downpour of a thunderstorm - is hardly to be noticed. The trails are just as dry as formerly, the earth ready to crack from several weeks of dry weather. The creek hardly appears as though it received a fresh infusion last night; it runs now at a very low ebb - lackadaisically.

Squirrels are everywhere; red, black and grey, in fall hunting mode to acquire food-storage materials for the long cold months ahead. They await our passage, eager to avail themselves of the daily peanut hand-outs. This is a true precursor to fall, brisk and windy to the point of jacket-weather, although we're only wearing long-sleeved tee-shirts - admittedly with short-sleeved tee-shirts underneath for that additional comfort zone.

Fall is suggested in the prematurely-turning leaves of trees and shrubs that have obviously been health-compromised. Their bright red, rust-curled leaves have begun to fall to the ground, leaving bare, black limbs, ready for whatever is to come. As it is always so for this time of year, fungi have begun to appear; pure white mushrooms, and those ghastly flat-headed pale blue mushrooms, as well, in the underbrush.

Fall asters are now reigning supreme, among the languishing Queen Anne's lace and the still-blooming clovers. There are the undistinguished asters in abundance, and here and there, delighting us, those delicately-toned pink and mauve ones, those with the luxuriant heads. We see minuscule colonies of bright orange fungi on tree stumps, and odd-appearing shelf fungi on an old yellow birch.

The cardinals we see and hear are beginning to moult; they sound somehow less enthusiastic, their songs less scintillatingly brilliant. But perhaps we're attributing our late-summer apprehensions to them, that famous anthropomorphizing that humans are wont to engage in when considering the other creatures with whom we share this Earth.

On our return home, I desultorily begin cleaning up the gardens of long-bloomed perennials, but simply do not feel like continuing. I gather a half-dozen ripe tomato orbs, and in the kitchen, slice them, drizzle them with olive oil, and sprinkle sweet basil from our herb garden over, to let them sit and absorb the flavours to enrich our dinnertime experience.

Then I dawdle, on the glider with little Riley beside me. Both of us completely relaxed on the deck, while my husband continues his work on the new garden shed. He has almost completed the roof shingling. We see this project, like all the others he has undertaken over the years, coming to completion.