Wet Walk

          Fall color is popping out all over the place...

... and with fall, comes rain.

         The clouds rolled in, taking our sunshine away.

          Little puppy dogs still need to get out and stretch their legs, so I put on my rain boots, grabbed my brelly and my camera and out we went. 

          The milkweed seeds are weighted down with raindrops and can't fly away on the breeze.

          Droplets on a multiflora rose.

          I've captured an image of a leaf in this one.

And this one has a thorny stem in it.

          A monarch on his way to Mexico.

 He had raindrops on his antennae.

          An aster.

          We badly need the rain. My pond had been down to one little puddle but today there is more water in it.

          "You might have a muskrat," Jon Robinson told Mike when Mike asked why our pond dries up in the fall.

          Our pond is only a couple of feet deep so I just chalked it up to a dry summer.

          The upper end of the walking path. Mike keeps it mowed for me and the girls.

          This is where the Bittersweet grows. See the falling raindrop?

          A hornet on goldenrod. He sat there and stared at me the whole time I was taking his picture. He never moved; just stood his ground as if daring me to come closer. I didn't. I left him alone.

          A close-up of the plain-old, common-old, ordinary-old, dandelion. Now who thinks this isn't a pretty flower?

          The back of our place. Someday someone will come looking for metal scrap and I'll give him my old washers. I don't want to haul them.

          A maple leaf. But I bet you knew that.

          A leaf-hopper on my rhody. This was a different day — see, no raindrips.... errr.... drops. But since I'm showing pictures, when I ran out of rain ones, I just kept right on a going.

          Fall is definitely in the air. "Have you heard any geese?" I asked the Kipps on a morning in the not so distant past.

          "No. I haven't," Rosie answered.

          "Nope," Lamar concurred.

          "Me neither. Which surprises me. The hummingbirds are gone. The monarchs are almost gone... why haven't the geese left yet?"

          And this past week, that all changed. In the span of fifteen minutes, I saw/heard four flocks of geese heading south. They fly so high! Cruising altitude for the geese are two to eight thousand feet! Pilots have even reported seeing them at nine thousand feet!

                    Lazy cats.

                    And a lazy cat yawn.

          Of course I say that, but cats are nocturnal and these guys will stay out all night. And lazy? They're not really. I've seen the remains of several jumping field mice — at least four this summer. No telling how many they got that I didn't see. And Spitfire, the tabby with the white belly, brought in all kinds of baby rabbits this spring. Feisty caught a ground squirrel. So my cats do hunt. Do they eat everything they catch? No. Not everything. But a lot of it they do.

          Why just this past week I found this on the floor of Mike's workshop.

          "Rat," you say.

          I know, right! That was my first thought too. Gingerly I picked him up by the tip of his tail and carried him out. I laid him in the grass so I could get a picture of his topside and when I saw his face, I didn't think it looked rat enough.

          Could it be a muskrat? I wondered.

          So I did what I always do when I have a problem. I went to my mother.

          "Momma, what do you think? Rat or muskrat? I don't think the nose is long enough for a rat. And I think the ears are too short."

          "I think it's a rat," she told me.

          If I'd have known more about muskrats before I chucked him into the weeds, I could have checked his tail. A muskrat tail is flat on the vertical to help them swim.

          "You'll just have to Google it," Momma said.

          I did just that and I know it's not a black rat, but it could very well be a brown rat, so I suspect my mother's right.

          I got a start on making things to sell if the lady from The Cabin Country Store calls me before Christmas. I already have some things made but I thought these tea light candleholders are cute so I made one. And I tried it out. I'm going to make a few Christmas themed stained glass suncathcers, like a Santa, a bell, maybe a simple nativity. But I don't want to make too many because she won't sell any after Christmas.

          I also spent some time grating two bars of Fels-Naptha soap for homemade laundry soap; a job I'd been putting off until the very last minute.

          "Peg! You can buy that stuff you know," you say.

          I know, right! But I love the homemade stuff, I just don't like grating it, that's all.

          Tuesday, as we sat on the patio visiting with the Kipps, a semi went past on our little dirt road. We chat a little longer then we hear a back-up beeper.

          "I better go and make sure he doesn't wipe out my mailbox," Lamar says.

          "Let's go see, Peg," Mike says.

          "No," I says... say. "I've got better things to do — you go."

          But Mike didn't want to go without me — I don't know why. He sat on the couch and looked so dejected.

          "You could take pictures..."

          Now there's a man who knows the way to my heart. "Okay," I relent. "Let's go."

          I grab my camera and we jump on the golf cart. There's Rosie in her bright pink shirt with Maggie at her side.

         We pass them up and get to the corner and there's the semi with his trailer smack-dab overtop of Lamar's mailbox.

          "He got your mailbox," I state.

.         "Nope, he moved it, but he got the newspaper box."

          We watched as a pickup truck, attached to the trailer with a chain, tries to pull the trailer back up onto the road. All he did was spin his wheels.

          "Mike, would your tractor have more power than the truck?" I asked.

          "I think so," he answered and went to talk to Tony, the man who'd been driving the semi.

          "Are you going with me?" Mike asked when he came back.

          "No, I'll stay here."

          Mike took the golf cart home to get the tractor.

          I walked over and chatted with Tony. "In a small town like this, we take excitement wherever we can find it!" I told him.

            He laughed.

          Pretty soon Mike came back with the tractor and the pickup moved out of the way and they hooked the tractor up. 

           But pulling sideways on a trailer that was sitting still wasn't budging it an inch. The tractor dug ruts in the road.

          "You know Lamar, it seems to me they should be pulling back as they pull over."

          "Me too," Lamar agreed as we watched from a safe distance. "But they don't listen to me."

          They repositioned the tractor and this time Mike tried to pull the trailer as Tony backed it up. It helped some, but it wasn't enough.

          After a short conference, they decided to have Mike take some of the weight off the trailer as the pickup truck pulled and Tony backed up.

          And it worked!

          Yay for team effort!

          The trailer was far enough on the road that Tony could back up, get the trailer way off to the side...

... and cross the open grate of our little one-lane bridge.

          One of Tony's guys put Lamar's mailbox back where it belongs while Tony parked the truck on the other side of the bridge and walked back. Then he sent his guy for a sledge hammer and they put the newspaper box back up.

          "Where's a rock?" Tony asked and started scanning the ground.

          "There's never one around when you need one," I said and helped to look.

          "There's a whole bunch down at the creek," Lamar volunteered and he and Tony walked down the bank and came back with a few. Tony took one and pushed it in at the base of the newspaper box pole.

          "Where's that hammer?" Tony asked and looked up. "Bring that hammer over here," he said to his buddy.

           Lamar and I stood back and watched. "Wow, Lamar, it's as good as new!"

          "Better."

          "The next guy is going to have a hard time taking it down now," I joked, but of course, a few rocks are no match for a semi.

          Mike, in the meantime, was using his tractor to back-blade the ruts he and the truck left in the road.

          Mailbox back in place, newspaper box back up and better than new, ruts smoothed over, forty-five minutes and 144 pictures later, Tony was shaking hands and thanking us for our help.

          "How much do I owe you?" he asked Mike as he pulled out his money clip.

          "Nothing," Mike said.

          "I don't work that way," Tony stated. "How much?"

          "Forget it," Mike said.

          "It's a gift," I told Tony. "If you pay for it, it's not a gift anymore. Don't take this nice thing we've done away from us."

          Tony couldn't argue with that. "Alright," he said and put his money clip away. "Thanks again, and you won't be seeing me anymore!" We all laughed. "I'm never coming this way again! I don't know why they sent me this way."

          They left.

          Lamar went home.

          I sat on the tractor bucket and rode home that way.

          A little later on, on the very same day as the semi-stuck-on-the-bridge day, I asked, "Mike, can we go out to Ahern's for apples?"

          "Sure," he responded.

          "It's such a beautiful day, can we take the back way? Maybe I can get some fall foliage pics."

          "Yeah."

          "Do you know the way?"

          "I think so."

          We decided to take the girls, Itsy and Ginger, with us because they like to be with us and most times we have to leave them at home.

          Ginger loves to ride with her head out the window. I'm snapping away... 

...and many of my shots have doggie ears in them.

          Some doggies have no respect for the camera, you know what I mean?

          "I think we have to go to the end of Paradise Road and take a left," Mike said.

          "You want me to call Rosie?" I asked.

          "I don't care."

          "Rosie, we're at the end of Paradise Road, which way do we go to get to Ahern's?" I asked when she picked up the phone.

          "Let me think," Rosie said.

          About that time we came up to a T. "Oh here's Rienze Road. Which way?" I knew Aheren's was on Rienze Road but I wasn't sure which way to go. Rosie started giving me directions but in the meantime, Mike made an executive decision and turned left. We popped up over a hill and there it was. Mike still has good instincts from all the years he spent driving truck.

          "Thank you Rosie."

          "If they have any Northern Spy, would you pick us up some?" she asked.

          "Sure. How many do you want?"

          "I'm not sure what they have..." Rosie trailed off.

          "Well, just a minute and I'll tell you. We're here and Mike is parking as we speak."

          "All right."

          I gave Rosie the sizes and prices of the Northern Spy apples and she told me what she wanted. Then I picked out some apples and some cider for us. There wasn't anyone there, but there was a sign.

          "Sorry we're not here right now. If you need change it's in the black box."

          Well, holy cow! There was a lot of money in the box. I don't really know how much because I didn't really look at it. I just put our money in the appropriate spots — we didn't need change — shut the lid and left.

          "Someone's going to rob them," Mike said. "There's a lot of money in there." And that's how I knew there was a lot of money in there.

          I don't know how often they lose money or product by being so trusting. Maybe the next time we go back someone will be there and I can ask them. On the way home I took more pictures for you.

          Because the day was so gorgeous, and we were on back roads, I could ride with the window down, which made a little dog very happy.

          Coming back, we stopped at the Kipps to deliver their apples to them. We spent a little time standing in the back yard chatting. "Why doesn't someone steal their money?" Mike asked, still dumbfounded that that much money would be left unattended.

          "I don't know," Rosie answered. "Maybe they do."

          "Did you see that other semi come down the road?" Lamar asked.

          "No we didn't," Mike told him.

          "Another semi from the same company tried to cross the bridge a couple of hours after the first one."

          "What'd you tell him?" I asked.

          "I told him if he followed the other guys tracks he could make it across too, and I showed him the tracks. But he wouldn't and he backed up until he could turn around."

          The whole time we were standing there ladybugs kept landing on us. When we got home I found that I'd brought one with me. I took him outside, put him on a pretty red leaf, and tried to get his picture. Unfortunately, after just two blurry shots, he spread his elytra and took off.

          Yeah!  We shall call this one a fail, however, I hardly ever show you my fails, so I just wanted you to know that it happens to me sometimes too.

          Now, before we wrap this up, let me show you the colors of my dining room.

          And here's something else you don't see very often. Me! I was painting down near the floor and tipped my ponytail right into the paint pan!

          My kitchen is yellow on one wall. Mike picked it. "I want all your days to be filled with sunshine," he said.

          And since that's where the heart of the home is, and where I spend a lot of my time, it was the perfect room for it.

          Let's call this one done!