Frost!

It snuck up on me this year. It's not like I didn't know it was coming. Maybe I was just preoccupied with my own petty personal transitions, a trip out of town, back into the routine of work, classes, meetings, sleeping in my own bed. It must have been Friday night that the plants got zapped - the potted lilies that I should have brought inside, the tomatoes of course, a volunteer squash vine, and a couple of basil plants long gone to seed. I don't know why all 16 pepper plants went unscathed, or why nothing ever gets "scathed" if it takes a direct hit from some scathing death rays. Anyway.

It's getting colder, and not all of a sudden, although it seems that way. The trees are turning - all of a sudden. The maple tree across Plum Street from our house went from green to bright yellow in two days, or so my brain registered it. The white pines along the north side of our yard have shed a ton of pinestraw, which looks good beside the raised beds and stepping stones, just one more reason to love pine trees. And these surface changes made me glad to be back in my own garden after my visit to the MoreGardens! house in the Bronx last week. It felt cozily good to walk in the back gate and up the walk into the enclosed yard, which is still my favorite room in the house, before going in the back door. Home is where the freely falling mulch is.

I guess the time change has something to do with my sudden recognition of the obvious gradual changes, and the fact that it coincides with Halloween. It's colder, it's darker, the plants are either dying or going to sleep for six months. All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, this is the dying time of year. Ghosts and skeletons walking every street (also pirates and princesses, but I'm ignoring whatever doesn't fit my thesis). It's all around us, people, and we should ponder the gravity of it all, as befits the prevailing darkness, cold, and deepening gloom!

Not necessarily. I saw a praying mantis yesterday lounging on the underside of a wheelbarrow in the late-afternoon sun. That's a good omen, right, mantises are friendly garden creatures? I saw a shooting star last night while walking the dog down by Alumni Creek. That should mean something too.

Jessi went up to Northeast Swingstate U. for the weekend to visit his sister, and they celebrated Halloween with Helga's friends and 20,000 other young people decked out in their ghoulish best. The streets of Cuyahogaburg were packed with costumed revelers, so apparently that campus has followed the lead of its sister school, Southeast Swingstate U. down in Hockingville, and turned Halloween into the major annual party. Just speculating here, but maybe the fall harvest coldsnap and festival of darkness is this culture's unofficial night of wild bacchanalian release, as Mardi Gras and Carnival are for our Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Brazilian partying brethren, but inverted for us northerners.