~:: November 2013 ::~

I know this is November because G has already sucked up all the leaves. October is a glorious riot.  November is this quiet, sorta peaceful and bland time between wild October and glorious December.

See how the children are playing so nicely together?  Remind you of something you might have heard in the backseat of your car a few times?

So prettily does Toby protest.

Backyard. This is what the whole place looks like before G runs over it with the giant vacuum.  At this point, I am waiting with fists on hips for him to do this so we can put up the poles for the Christmas lights. I made him put the front lights up in the middle of October because I have spent too many dang years trying to do it with my hands frozen at the end of November. I smile. MUCH nicer job in October.

This year when we went to Swiss Days, the massive craft fair that draws artisans from all over the country every September – to a little town up northeast of us – (this sentence is really long), we found my favorite booth, the Bartletts.  These guys are from Idaho and they make these fabulous, whimsical things out of metal – mostly out of antique farm stuff like milk buckets and old tractor harrow things.

This is a wind thing.  I saw this thing first about three, four years ago and hungered after it. When the wind blows, the fish go around and around – and such fish.  But I am nothing, if not thrifty, so I couldn’t lay out the brass. The next year, they’d changed the design, moved on. And I was SO SAD.  But this year – here the thing was, in full, rotating glory in their crowded stall, and since I actually have very little character, and G is no match for my whining, I bought the thing.

Hard to see, since it’s dead-leaf colored. And the funny thing is, if we’d put it up in the front yard, it’d be rotating almost all the time.  But even in the early storms of Autumn, it hardly moved.  Seems we picked the most peaceful spot in the whole yard. Which is good to know.  We should all know where the peaceful spots are.  But since the leaves have come down, the fish do a whole lot more swimming.

More yard.  I love this place SO much.

So I was driving home from the horses one day, and was passing our beloved neighbors’ and this is what I saw – the whole crazy family plus a grandmother out doing all the leaves at once. The sun was behind the house, but it had limned each of them with this halo of light – and it was just like somebody had put a spotlight on this house, with a caption: One Wonderful Family.  So I made them recreate the scene after I’d pulled into the driveway and run for the camera.

Tucker, frightening the deer.

And that is the end.