Fair Weather Days

We’ve had some cloudless French blue skies in the past few days following freezing nights. With sharp sunny days that are almost balmy; windless days when the air feels so still and hardly a breeze passes over the shrubbery, but the nights inside seem to need a good fire going since we could otherwise hang meat in here. And it seems that we went from summer to winter/fall instead of the other way around. But then, each season of this year has been like this. Spring was wet and cold, more like the 4th month of winter. Summer was late and hardly had a really hot day. Then in the last month of it just when it did fall into line, fall arrived with bluster, shortening summer by weeks.
So, this year, due to an abundance of early leaves and an equal abundance of gusty winds lately, I have stopped trying to sweep the pathways squeaky clean every day. Instead, I sweep the leaves away from our front door and whoosh them down that pathway and try to either hide most of them under low hanging greenery or push them rudely into the first patch of scraggly grass I see. And eventually my clever husband passes the mountain of assorted leaves and reduces the pile considerably. He actually likes to remove these beauties. I actually love to leave them be to dissipate at their whim. This process is quicker and easier than my normal routine of almost vacuuming up the pathways. Nature always wins anyway. I’m now wondering why I’ve bothered all these past years trying to keep up with this deluge of mixed leaves. Besides, they’re awfully pretty with contrasting shapes and sizes and colors strewn all together in a jumbled mess. They are so random, like me.
I don’t like when everything is so well ordered that it seems artificial. Don’t worry Lol, no one would ever think that this mess is fake. We’ve got the real thing here in spades.
Today started out really well. We had a very sunny morning for a pleasant change. Usually, it might take a few hours to get to being sunny like that. There were a few flies buzzing around so I opened the French doors forgetting that I left a window open in the kitchen also. Later, as the wind picked up, and the skies were darkening quickly, the leaves were starting to fly around the yard and were being deposited here and there, Of course, that’s the consequence of living so close to so many deciduous trees. Suddenly, I heard something crash from the kitchen window sill which fell to the awaiting soft ground outside. Some cutesy things must have fallen onto the ground. So, braving the changing weather that threatened a brief storm, I put on my gummies and went to see what had landed, hoping the soil would cushion its fall. But I was forgetting that the chickens were starting to congregate near there for their early dinner. The contrast between the fading landscape in its autumn attire and the brilliantly colored feathered flock staring at me pensively, thinking I might have their food in my hands, was exceptional... so I ran back inside to get my camera. I hope you like these shots of my very photogenic chooks at The House of Cluck-Cluck. The leaves aren’t too bad either, in my somewhat biased opinion, of course. However, the photos don’t really show the intensity of the different hues in all of their striking splendor. But in person, wow!