This is the picture

A gallop through some of what we see around here. Back in mid-September we went apple-picking in Harvard -- near that experimental community begun by Louisa May Alcott's father Branson and a bunch of his transcendentalist cohorts.


They also had a couple peach trees.
Lots just waiting to succumb to the rains and the bees.
Honey in the making.
Three iterations of the barn Paul's been keeping track of:


And later, mid-October, we took a chilly Sunday morning walk down Main Street to see the piles of color heaped up in the sideyard of the closest farm to campus.


Hazel clambering in the Japanese maple just on the other side of our dorm.
Looking up.
Damn! I need to start doing my work. Much more fun to skate along through our recent weeks.

In front of the fire

Here we are! I'm about to come up for air, but not before writing a gazillion comments for end-of-term. Grades due soon-ish. The folks are with us -- the fire is going and we have a new stereo. Fruits of the paycheck. Cozy fireside this and that. Won't, as I say, fully enjoy until the work is done. But I miss posting and picturing!

Let's start with Halloween. Hazel from the get-go (not so very far back, just September) had wanted to be a Red Cat. So there you go. Thanks to Grammy for the essentials: perky vermillion ears and wonky, wavy, fury red tail. Which shed a ton.

And the finishing touches. For the record, I am wearing Grandaddy Gurney's World War I (that's One) Navy middie, circa 1918.
Wide grins and happy whiskers.
And the action clip, tail doin' its thang.

Everyone says this house on Old Deerfield's Main Street always has the most enormous gourds.
And one grin from very close.
And from across the street, the full effect of the house-wide jack-o-lantern grin.
And then much rambling from house to house, shouting for just three more SweetTarts to keep the train rolling along, succumbing to the super-chill of winter approaching, and ultimately face-planting at the last house -- right smack from the lamentably divitty side-lawn onto the cold stone front walk. Tears! Lamentations! And home to bed.

Now for the riotous color from someone else's garden -- we've been the happy recipients of some delicious peppers. Not since Hatch Valley bounty sent direct from friend Martha in New Mexico have I smelled the incomparable aroma of home-roasted peppers, an intoxicating mouth-wateringly yum of a smell.

Girlfriend's lovin the chill and the sun and the fall and her dada!
Here Hazel wears a gift from Cuzin Caz: a pair of Ukranian slippers, with a side of silly.
The sky's on fire. Paul and Hazel came down to one of our last Thirds Field Hockey practices. Paul brings his camera and here is the sun's reach, even after the set.
This barn (inexplicably, number 28) is somewhere around here, and Paul keeps taking beautiful photographs of it.
"There she goes!!!" Said in that cool voice of David Byrne's.
Whass that?

More to come. Time for bed. So nice to be unhooked from the round-and-round of school, to be listening to Alison Krauss and indulging in the so-lovely of processing my own thoughts and life instead of others'. Give thanks!

Just 'cause

I love this set of I'm-taking-of-you and you're-taking-of-me. On my birthday, October 28 (which inconveniently fell on a Thursday), Paul took us off to a little out-of-the-way coffee shop and music store, restaurant and book shop -- what had been an old mill is now a hopping little corner of cool. (The music shop's motto is "Stuff you don't need in a place you can't find"). So there was a lot of picture-taking and what not. I like the ones Hazel took of her mama!

Paul was ordering and asking what I wanted!
Now it's my turn.
Whose birthday did you say it was?
Giving us all the run-around. (Though the photos don't say much about it, we are in full throttle thrumming tantrumming threes. Super fun.)