Rocky Point October

Sunny!  Clear!  Crisp! at 66 glorious degrees F

I know, I know…it is supposed to be a blog about traveling, or the MoHo, or at least something a bit adventurous.  But I just couldn’t resist talking about October right here at home.  Looking back to past years, it seems to be a repeating pattern.  October is probably the most glorious month of the year, at least when it doesn’t snow.

The leaves on the aspens are at their high point.  I have to take photos every year, and it seems as though I keep going back to the same spots where the aspens have a particular shade of pinky orange, usually backlit since the sun is rather low in the sky.  Every year the colors are different, just a little bit here and there, but different enough that I have to take another picture of the same spot.

The colors in the yard are different each year as well.  There is lots of shade here and trying to get our hardwoods to flourish is a labor of love.  A few of the flowering cherries and crabapples have finally reached high enough to find the sun and are growing in leaps and bounds.  The maples are so gorgeous, but due to the shade, they never get really fat and thick the way they might in the sunshine.  But oh, how that brilliance lights up the forest!

My greenhouse didn’t do as well this year as some past.  The tomatoes are still trying to ripen, although I did get a few.  Seems as though the best crop this year was the bush beans, which fed us many meals of yummy fresh beans.  We even tried to grow corn.  Probably won’t do that one again.  Even though I had pollinated the silks, I guess I am not as good as the wind or bees, since the cute little ears had about 2 inches of filled out kernals and 6 inches of what looked like baby corn from a can.  ah well, the price of living in a forest in the Cascades…

Now home for a bit of time, and no longer working even part time, I found myself with time to play with all that fabric I have been hoarding.  I had a couple of projects that were cut out last spring, when it was still raining, and some ideas rolling around in my head that would wake me up at 3 in the morning.  Fabric does that, kind of the way yarn used to do it to me.  It has nothing to do with the quilting exactly, but more to do with the color, the playing with color, moving it around, blending it, turning it into something different than the sum of the parts. Even though I mentioned the quilt in the last post, I didn’t have a photo of it, so here it is.

Mo likes fall too.  Her favorite thing is fixing stuff, and with the lawns slowing down she has less mowing time and more fixing time.  The Rocky Point place is getting all ready for winter.  Wood is in, cabin is winterized, our road has been re-graveled by Mo and her trusty tractor, the chains for the tractor are on and the blade is ready.

Winter will be short this year for us.  Sometimes it snows in October, often in November, almost always in December.  Last year in December we were plowing and shoveling and blowing every single day for two weeks!  January it is getting a bit old, but for us this year it won’t matter at all, since we will be heading south.  Snowbirds?!  If we go south for three months in a motorhome does that make us snowbirds??

Today we are leaving for Junction City to have our new dinette booth and table installed and the sofa taken out.  Of course I’ll take photos of the process, and hopefully we will love it.

During this month past, Time has given the blessing of long lazy visits with daughter Melody on her day off, having coffee and doing the girl talk thing.  It is the little things that matter somehow.  Time also allowed me to finally almost finish going through the last of Bel’s (my friend who passed away last February) stuff that was in storage and send it off to her sister. Time gave me a day of at long last starting a “retirement project” that has been on my list for the last few years, and one I never could seem to get started.

I am copying a gazillion old videos to DVD, with the hope that someday I will figure out how to edit the goofy footage to the really good parts.  In the mean time, I get to look at what I looked like when I was 51.  Geez?!  I wanna do that again….but I seem to remember at 51 I felt really old….Time.

What is it about fall that makes Time seem so precious.

And friends, old and new.  Blogging and Facebook are mixed blessings, I know, but I have to thank my new friend, John Parsons, for somehow finding me on Facebook, writing about truly amazing stuff about water, climate, fires, and the planet in general, and actually being the conduit that helped me to find another old friend from the 80s, Marti Bridges.  We worked together for SCS back then and had some truly great times together. 

And then, of course, I received news from my friend Jeanne, (who anyone who reads this blog even a little bit should remember).  Jeanne had GREAT GREAT news and it seems that I will be traveling to Vermont to share it with her next fall.  Ahhhh  I can hardly wait till it is old news and Jeanne has told everyone and I can talk about it!  Jeanne, do you have a clue just how much self control it took for me to NOT put that photo on my blog??

Time and Friends and the Internet.  What more could I ask for.