Unposted

Some of my best thoughts never make it to paper, real or virtual. Last weekend we had beautiful fall weather and I had all sorts of ethereal flights of fancy of posting about, “A Room With a View.” I’ll probably use that title for a post someday, maybe over the winter, when we have our first snowfall.

As I looked out the windows at the flaming colors and, “saw red,” I was ready to compose all sorts of prose about leaves drifting to the ground one at a time, “as if being dropped by an unseen prop master, to create a perfect autumn scene.” By the end of the day, I wanted to say, “My lawn looks as if fall has fallen.”

Well, this week, I’m not feeling quite so romantic. My lawn looks like fall has fallen and it can’t get up. All of our oak trees seem to have dropped their leaves at once. The pine trees have dropped needles all over, too. I see work ahead, a whole lot of work, lots and lots and lots of work.

I must confess that the luxury of seeing autumn through a poet’s eyes was mine alone in our household. While I sat back and mused last weekend about the splendid fall, my husband was already busy, cleaning gutters and installing shields in an attempt to keep any further detritus from getting into them. Yet even he, wonderful human being that he is (I’m planning to have him read this, can’t you tell?), commented on the amazing colors and the pleasure of the cooler temperatures.

All of this unwanted ground cover did provide one moment of comic relief for me late this week. One of my hounds, while snuffling amongst the leaves in the back yard, brought her head up with a pair of pine needles pinched onto the end of her nose, just like a clothes pin. She missed the humor that I found in the moment. I wish I had a photo to share, a picture being worth a thousand words, but this is one of those images that must exist in memory alone. Unposted.