Changing Seasons

I called it a day about 7 pm and went outside for the mail. It felt and smelled like autumn. The temp is in the low 60s and the large Norwegian maple near the mailbox, among the first to lose leaves, has already littered the driveway with quite a few. There's certainly an aroma of Fall to those dead, dry leaves.

It's cloudy so even darker, Katy is out to one of her meetings and I was just going to turn on the Yanks in the kitchen (I can't watch the Mets any more) to see if Derek gets the hits he needs to pass Lou Gehrig. But my sense of summer being over prompted me to put on my sweatshirt, fetch a Punch Corona from my humidor and head for the deck to watch the ballgame. There I encountered another sign of Fall. Eight deer, a spike buck and a mix of doe (not 'does') and fawns wandering under the Catalpa tree to the orchard where the few remaining apple trees are dropping their fruit - a deer favorite. I never tire of seeing them up close but I could do without the epithets the deer evoke from Katy when they munch on her beloved flowers.

A coyote got the neighbor's cat yesterday. I think that's why the irksome woodchucks who were living under our deck in the Spring haven't been seen for several months. One person's predator is another's balance of nature!