Walking in the Snow and Fallen Leaves

A few inches of snow greeted us yesterday. It was unusually beautiful with the fluffy lumps of snow adding a punch of white to the already riotous color of God's Fall artistry. I remember wondering a while ago, when will summer come and when did it go and now I wonder, will we see much more autumn or will it suddenly be winter? There is a season for everything under heaven but these are going by just a little too fast. We're still putting away the summer goods and soon the snow plow will be needed. Oh well, whatever happens with the weather - it's so good to be alive and able to experience it.

Busy Days

Wintry air swept in fast and we've been hustling these days - it seems like Fall is the busiest time of the year. We had a ten day visit from Grandma Milli and it was fun and went by fast. I dug up the Impatiens, Begonias and Geraniums and brought them in for the winter - they'll go out again in the spring. We're picking the garden vegetables and the only ones left out there are the cabbages, beets, broccoli and carrots. Bing picked all the apples and it was a banner year. I'm canning tomatoes and will can some salsa because we have good tomatoes and peppers to spare. The camper is winterized and sitting near the A-frame instead of down the hill. We figure Bing can sit in it when he boils sap next spring and maybe we'll take it south somewhere during the winter - it'll be easier to dig it out of the snow and we won't have to bring it up our new hill road - that should be quite a slippery sliding hill and probably not navigable.

Joyful News

The word is out and we are rejoicing. Son, Dan's wife. Cori, is pregnant with their first child. The baby is due in May and we're so happy for them and for us and for Cori's family - another grandchild with which to fall in love! The picture attached is an image from Google but it looks just like our three sons at birth.

A Momentously Excellent Outstanding Day

Our kitchen saw red today. I pressure canned thirty six pints of tomatoes from the garden - our best tomato crop in years and there's more to come because we haven't frozen hard yet. But the outrageously happy exciting news came from out west where son number two and his lovely wife reside. Can't quite reveal it yet but Dad and I are smiling hard.

"Special Day" Today

About a dozen years ago, when our first grandchild, Michaela, moved to Rhinelander, we established "Special Day". One day a week. we'd drive to town and pick her up and spend the day doing fun things and bonding in a special seniors to toddler way. As four more grandchildren joined the brood, each was added to the fun and we've had the rare privilege to know and love the little ones and are now so proud to see them all blossom into very special people. Today we had the three younger ones and it was great. We planned halloween costumes, planted some perennials, picked some flowers that managed to avoid last week's frost, picked apples, watched some DVDs and played charades. The pictures show Grandpa and the kids picking Honey Crisp apples and the flower arrangements we made with the frost escaping flowers. Summer has transitioned to Fall and the joyful beat of the Earth's rhythm goes on. The dance goes on.

Freshening the Blog

Well, the old way of posting doesn't seem to motivate me to write so I thought I'd try more of a diary type - short and sweet and topical of the days here at Lakeside Gardens. Today it was a dark and blustery day but with the bluster came some much needed rain. The TV weatherman said that we just lived through the third dryest September ever up here and we're about a dozen inches of rain behind for the year. So it was joyful rain. I made my morning rounds of the grounds with a jaunty green umbrella and I could hear the vegetation slurping in the water and gasping long sighs as their thirst was finally quenched.

Underground Magic

My three sons write blogs. Their blogs are so much deeper than this epistle. They speak of gravity and timelessness and transmogrification and galaxies beyond ours and atoms, molecules and the wherefore, the why and the impossible when of existence. And today we will discuss the potato! I love the potato. It is a humble unlikely purveyor of life. It spends its days underground. It exists to bring life and carries within it a powerhouse of vitamins and minerals that provide our bodies with health and vitality. We had some leftover potatoes in our root cellar this late spring. They were shriveled and full of eyes that were sprouting. I planted them and soon forgot about them because they weren't in the garden but on the hillside and in the compost pile. Then one day I remembered to look for them and I was happy to see that they had grown to be nice plants but that the deer must have thought so too and they munched off their greenery. Then today as I went to aerate and water the compost heap, I decided to see if the potatoes had survived. Wow, it was fun digging them up and finding firm healthy food under the dirt! I see why potatoes helped the nation of Ireland survive the great famine. From a shriveled inch long piece of potato, comes a hundred times more food. In spite of weeds and neglect and lipsmacking deer, the stalwart veggie produced. I thank God for potatoes and all our forebears that have devised such delicious ways to partake of them. There are hashed browns and baked and parsley buttered and french fried, scalloped, au gratin and potato salad. Salut! P.S. that's a leprechaun I just happened to capture in the picture.