Falling

"If I fell in love with you
Would you promise to be true
And help me understand.
'Cause I've been in love before
And I found that love is more
Than just holding hands."

No shit! Aah, naivete. We had it! From the Beatles "If I Fell".

The leaves are falling, the temperature is falling, the day length is falling, and soon snow will be falling. Last week was still warm (above freezing) and not too rainy, but the last vestiges of autumn are showing.

 The wind kicked up, but the sound was different. The rustling of leaves was replaced by a whistling over the bare branches and the crisp, cool mornings were a reason to put on a jacket.

The Cooker made a pot roast last night with veggies that Stitch harvested from her gardens. It was all our home grown except the meat. It was delicious!

The rearranging that the beavers did last fall has had some postponed results, like this tree they didn't finish dropping.

I sometimes think that their long-term strategy for water control may reach out many generations ahead. It will be interesting to see what they do on their way through this fall.

I set up the critter cam near the apple tree and left it for two weeks. There were 1170 pictures of mostly deer. There were a few bucks, a fawn nursing on its mother, raccoons, bunnies (snowshoe hares), a coyote, a fox, and some unidentifiable things, but it showed the flurry of feeding activity that is Fall. Maybe that's why I am so hungry. I am probably genetically programmed to fatten up in the fall for a sparse winter. How deep a role does genetics play? I wonder about this when the billboards on the way to the Big City show messages from happy babies. You know, the ones that say, "when I was a twelve week old fetus I had fingerprints!" I always think, "you also had gills and a tail!" Just things I wonder about.

In this picture of the middle pasture last week, there are still leaves on the Aspen trees. This week, not so much.

Our horse Gyllen Aften (Golden Evening in Norwegian), call name "Pookie" left this week to take a job as a therapeutic riding horse in central Minnesota. She was born here on the farm in June of 1996. She came home a couple of years ago after retiring from the Kentucky Horse Park where she was a driving horse for seven years. She is short, wide, strong, not easily bothered by things and she likes to work. I doubt if she'll come back here, but I may stop in to visit her on occasion just to see how she is doing. Here she is with Vedas in a light snowfall.

  Pookie is the wide one on the left. I was able to pick her up during the first few days of her life. Now she can carry my 200 pound carcass with no problem. Funny how things change with time and chapters seem to close in the Fall.