Fall flowers

This morning we flew from a place of many tall tulip poplars and deep shade to a place of small hackberry trees and open fields with a rather larger sky. The weather here is cooler than the usual late August, but warmer than Virginia. The sky overhead is clouded, which makes me think of people 12 hours' drive to our southeast, who await Category 5 Hurricane Katrina this week. I hope that no lives are lost, and that the storm proves less dangerous than it now appears. All my childhood and youth, horrible storms have hit the gulf coast, bringing nothing worse than cooling rain to us. I am willing to do without the rain, in return for less storm misfortune, but the choice is with the dealer.

This afternoon I went to Trinity Trail, my hiking home twenty minutes from our home. The flowers have gone to late Summer/early Autumn flowers. There are scads of the blue flower I call a cowslip, many of the purple flower tha looks like a cross between a thistle and a pineapple (but whose name escapes me, despite my wife having a wonderfully professional photo of one on our wall), and plover or killdeer striding along the receding lake. Many leaves have begun to turn colors in August, in keeping with our usual pattern of having no real "Fall color", but merely an inconsistent change in the heat, lasting from August to November--less "New England" than "New Shrivel".

Our back yard garden, a very successful planting, is in bloom with purple coneflowers, daisys, incredible black-eyed susans, seas of yellow flowers, and wonderful native plants of every description. Honey bees drink in the flowers as if Summer were coming to an end. I will try to devote a post to pictures of this bounty.

I listened on the selected shorts radio program to a DH Lawrence story that fascinated and repulsed me.
I am home and in a grand mood. It was a great vacation. It is a great time to be home.