Beginning Autumn

On the porch in September a brown spider
in its web. There are deaths that come so quietly.

Over the mountains, the half moon rising.
Behind the fence a neighbor's dog howls in the dark.

No matter what the poet says a yellow leaf
asks nothing. The green wail of spring is what I want.

When you follow the shoreline out of sight,
I listen to ocean in an empty shell.

I never intended my life to turn out this way.
How solitary the drifting boat on the water.

~ Jeanne Lohmann

The summer is winding to a close here in the Northwest. The tomatoes are still proffering their August bounty but the red harvest is dew-frosted in the mornings now, and the fat heirlooms are cracking in the cool nights. The grass is still sere but the green is creeping back in after the first of the autumn rains.

The pictures of the back of the house are testimony to my irritating parsimony. Despite the repeated warnings that "replacing gutters is often difficult and a professional roofer may be a long-term savings" I went ahead with replacing Missy's back roof gutter, and a nasty, unpleasant job it was. I can see a visible belly in the damn thing, and the brackets I used did not do a particularly adequate job of holding the inside of the gutter against the roofline, so I had to go back and hang some flashing to route the runoff into the gutter. It's the worst sort of jury-rigging, but it works, and as my old drill sergeant was wont to say; if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid...

I hope you are starting to see the signs of autumn, despite the poet's wail for spring, it is my favorite season of the year.