Why We Live Here

Our house stands in a remote corner of a housing development that bills itself as our fair city's "First Environmentally Planned Community." On my crabbiest days I have asserted that its environmental planning is limited to privacy fences and only the blandest exterior paint colors, but now that rain barrels and metal roofs are appearing in impressive numbers, I'm often able to turn my attention to some of the 'hood's positive aspects.

We live here because we're one block away from the Barton Creek Greenbelt, a seven-mile stretch of preserved land that is a vast array of trails, cliffs, waterfalls, and dense foliage. The greenbelt always appears on lists of the top five reasons to be in Austin, and justifiably so - it's that great. Although I am not the type to go hiking in the woods alone, sometimes in cooler weather I will go with Travis; in late spring and summer my snake and coyote apprehensions keep me out of there. Less for my own sake than the dude's - what would I do if he was attacked?

Half an inch of rain last Saturday night, the first to fall on our new metal roof, enough to fill the rain barrel and make me wish I'd not procrastinated in procuring three more. What to do with a damp, cloudy Sunday morning but take Travis for a hike in the greenbelt? He waited as patiently as he could for us to get ready and for me to dither between camera and phone (it could rain again) and search fruitlessly for the can of bug spray.

When on foot we generally enter from a gravel path a block from our house, and once off the gravel encountered the kind of dark clay mud that instantly added a slippery pound to the soles of our shoes. Floyd was sensibly in boots but I am slave to poorly constructed feet and so wore inadequate but supportive tennis shoes. Even after the muddy parts end, we'd contend with slippery rocks and tree roots for the next two hours of steady ups and downs.

Because he is a mountain biker, Floyd is very familiar with many miles of the trails that wind through the woods, across creeks, around rocky promontories and along cliffside trails so narrow they raise your heart rate. I'm pretty sure you could drop him into the greenbelt anywhere, and within five minutes he'd know exactly where he was. Me? Within five minutes of my own house I could be hopelessly lost unless Travis was with me.

Travis is as familiar with those trails as Floyd, and he also knows all the shortcuts that take him from one part of a trail to another. Floyd's friend Deano likes to say about mountain biking with Travis, "It's like a horror movie: every time you go around a turn, there he is, standing in the middle of the trail!"

How Does He Do It?

I set out in search of some early fall foliage pictures, but of course I'm too unruly to stick to any agenda, even my own. So I took photos as the images struck me.

Although the weather was mild, we were dressed to meet mosquitoes, and just as well. It wasn't until halfway through our walk that I remembered I'd put the bug spray in my car to take to #1 grandson's baseball game. Such a helpful place for it to be. I kept my rain jacket zipped all the way up like a turtleneck, sealing me in plastic so effectively I was sure I would melt away pounds of unwanted fat. I did not.

Life in a temperate climate often confuses me: I can't tell if it's spring or autumn. Wet weather has given the wildflowers a new lease on life even this late in October.

We walked past many stretches in which long rows of plant flotsam defined the areas where water had rushed through a couple of weeks ago, that night when a whole foot of rain fell. Such events always make me think of the wild critters who must have fled the roaring deluge in complete darkness in search of safer ground. It must be quite a sight.

Beside the trail, a bike chain fashioned into a heart, resting on a ring of rocks someone had placed to protect some tiny cactuses. Although it's not unusual to see such rock planters, a heart-shaped bike chain is not typical. I stood in my muddy shoes to take this picture and was surprised but not surprised to find out who had placed it there.

Many times when I've scrambled carefully down a steep section of the trail, I'll look back and try to capture a photo that conveys the madness of the drop. So far I have failed to do the phenomenon justice. It must just go without saying that this is not an area of the greenbelt to which I go to practice my paltry mountain biking skills.

All the steep parts look a whole lot steeper in real life.

On this day I only fell once, but I was walking.

There were many stretches of flowers in bloom. Rough photos, I know, but a.) I was using my phone, and b.) every time we stopped for two seconds we were bombarded by bloodthirsty winged creatures celebrating a brief cessation of the drought. Had to hurry.

A hike through the greenbelt is a challenging array of ups and downs, ups and downs. In wet weather every surface is slick. Floyd would reminisce about various trails we've hiked together before, but I was unable to say I recognized a thing. Maybe that's why I become so easily lost out here: I spend roughly 99% of my time looking down to avoid falling. How am I supposed to be able to see where I am?

Not that you would be on a mountain bike around here, I know you wouldn't; but just in case you were to be on a mountain bike around here, be aware that I've been told you aim for the groove between those gray rocks in the next photo. Doesn't it look like a fun little downhill?

Assuming you are capable of turning around and looking back a few seconds later, this is what you will just have ridden:

A few minutes later, you will be traversing a foot-wide stretch of mud on the rim of a growing sinkhole.

That big rain we had a week ago stripped an impressive amount of soil away from these trees, leaving them to appear more tethered than rooted.

At last a glimpse of the creek. Travis, knowing exactly where we were, urged us to hurry. Until the last big rain, the creek had been nothing but rocks and dust. Now, summer's over and we may even be looking at a slight reduction in the drought.

Travis cares about none of this. For him, the universe is officially reduced to STICK!

This happens to be the place where Travis took his first swim as a little puppy. I've never been down there when there were no other people or dogs. During wet seasons it's as popular as you would expect: swimming in the creek is a tradition that's gone on, I imagine, for centuries.

It's fall. New colors are showing up everywhere.

DIY Tales. Or, "The Vent Hood, the Roof, and the Rattling Chimney."

This post has nothing to do with gardening, food, or pleasant vacations near large bodies of water. It is a post about what can happen with a house on the heels of what seems like a perfectly good idea on the heels of what seemed like another perfectly good idea. Because house projects - as you know if you have ever lived in a house - follow the Domino Theory. One thing leads to another thing that leads to another thing, and before you know it you are living in dust up to your elbows and fighting with your most dearly beloved. First-world problem? Oh, yes.

But this one isn't really all my fault.

Do you know how smells can change for you? How a smell you never noticed can suddenly make its presence known? Any woman who's ever been pregnant knows what I'm talking about: yesterday's favorite food becomes a nauseous mess because the once cherished aroma has become, without warning, stomach-turning. I'm told that people receiving chemotherapy must be very careful about the foods they select while in treatment, because their once-favorite foods may become repellant to them simply because the smell has changed so drastically for the worse.

When I was pregnant with my son my then-husband and I were still quite young and poor, and so I carried our laundry to my parents' house each week to wash and dry. One afternoon I returned to our little apartment and started to make the bed when an unmistakable stink arose from the sheets: it was the remnants of my mother's cigarette smoke, a substance I had imbibed almost without the slightest trouble since before I was born (early 1950's). Aside from rainy days in a closed-up car, the smell had never bothered me before.

I would never do laundry in the presence of a smoker again, nor would cigarette smoking ever be allowed in our home again. This was the early '70s, and the policy lost us more than a few friends who clearly believed I'd gone off my rocker. I like to think I was merely ahead of my time.

Smells.

Over the past seven or eight years I've become terribly sensitive to cooking smells. I say terribly because I don't enjoy this phenomenon one bit. The onions and garlic I love to incorporate into my cooking are fine while the actual cooking is taking place; the problem comes at bedtime. If the smells linger, they intrude into my sleep and render me unable to close an eye all night. We live in Texas, remember, and I live with a Texan. Previous generations may have had to endure whatever nature had to throw at them, but all that ended with the arrival of central air conditioning. Windows are made to be closed, and that's that. Not to mention the fact that for half of the calendar year no right-minded person in Texas would want their windows open anyway.

So cooking smells linger and ruin my sleep.

I've told you before that my now-and-forever husband is thoughtful to a fault, and one example of this has been his zeal to install a truly effective vent hood over our stove. Not the stupid fan on the microwave that sucks in smells from the stovetop only to blow them out a few inches over your head, but a real, honest-to-goodness, blow-it-out-the-roof kitchen vent hood. Not only would it save me from dozens of insomniac nights every year, but we could also stir up the whole neighborhood's envy on the Sunday mornings when Floyd allowed himself to indulge in bacon.

So the vent hood part is Floyd's fault, and I guess I'll have to claim responsibility for the roof.

All through the summer, roofers were in the neighborhood. On every block I'd see various roofing company signs on front lawns. A few times, I'd been confronted by their sales forces, encouraging free estimates! We deal with your homeowners' insurance! All it costs you is your deductible!

Our house, built in 1998, was going to need a roof before too long. A "thirty-year roof" in central Texas usually proves to be good for roughly half that span of time. Our shingles were stained and discolored, and I saw that houses going up for sale around us almost invariably needed roof replacements even in our neighborhood's sellers' market. Why wait until we sell the house? Why shouldn't we enjoy a new roof while we live here?

[Cue Nora Jones: I too have always wanted to wake up with the rain falling on a tin roof. So, as it turns out, has my dear spouse. What fortune!]

No matter that a metal roof will run you roughly six times your deductible; it will be lovely and sturdy and good for the resale value. All over the 'hood, metal roofs were showing up. Sage green, taupe, beige (ugh), one memorable dusky red one that looks great on the white stone house it caps. And finally, finally one or two natural silvery roofs - the tin roof of our dreams. Reflective, energy-saving, attic-cooling: the real thing. That's what we would have.

It was a radical leap into the twentieth century for our homeowners' association's architectural committee to even entertain metal roofs. We had no idea until we talked with friends a few blocks away how difficult it would be to sell them on plain silver. I was glad I was prepared. Among other application hoops, we also had to jump through the hoop of asking our immediate neighbors for their written approval. !

Evidently there is some concern that sunlight reflecting off a plain metal roof may disturb the serenity of people in the upper floors of houses located close to your own. Or perhaps the reflected rays will melt your neighbor's SUV. This kind of thing tends to turn neighbors who are characteristically indifferent to one another into sworn lifelong enemies. Suburbs being what they are, nasty arguments erupt on the neighborhood list serve, creating enmity where once only friendly chatter was exchanged over the back fence. Lawsuits ensue.

So we collected our signatures. We obtained our approval. We signed the contract. A day was chosen for the work to begin. The roofing company people took the time to explain that metal roof installation takes longer than slapping up plain old shingles. They also explained that rainstorms might seem louder. They stopped just short of explaining that workers would be walking around on the top of our house during the replacement process.

It was time to get serious about the vent hood project. No better time to cut a hole in a perfectly sound roof than when said roof is being re-covered.

The choice of brand was up to me. I decided to go with a local shop that's been around since before I came to Austin. We'd bought our vacuum from them, and we have a dishwasher of that same brand; both have made us very happy consumers. Why not go with their vent hood? So I picked one out and Floyd and I had all the typical conversations customers have with salespeople - except of course that this customer was going to be doing the installation himself and so required very detailed specs. Credit cards were handed over and in a few days the glorious stink-sucking beauty arrived.

I couldn't imagine deciding how and where to make a hole in a perfectly good ceiling to allow a metal pipe to travel up through the attic and thence to a new hole in a perfectly good roof. It is a wonderful thing to be married to someone who is not only a highly experienced pipe-fitter, but who has also participated in the creation of numerous houses. Floyd knew just what to do, initiating the project by creating a reasonable walkway through our ridiculously useless attic and determining exactly where the major operations would take place.

One weekend we took down the cabinets and microwave over the stove, a radical move in a kitchen that isn't exactly flush with storage space. I'd already decided that the dead space to the left of the vent hood would be a perfect place for custom made shelf-cum-pot-rack creations; this would free up two entire lower cabinets. In a kitchen that boasts the stupidest pantry in the history of pantries*, why worry about a little lost storage space?

Then Floyd commenced reconfiguring the wall behind the stove to make a good secure space for the vent hood. Dry wall had to be removed, an electrical outlet relocated, extra pieces of two-by-four screwed between studs to create an ultra-strong backing for the plywood to which the machinery would be anchored. A great deal of clambering into and out of the space behind the stove (the space through which the mechanicals and the chimney for our gas fireplace travel) was involved, no small feat for a man who had taken an impressive fall from his mountain bike earlier in the week and insulted his ribs.

I will never really understand how Floyd can so effectively bruise so many planes of his body in the same fall. I don't want to know, really. This most recent one involved smashing up his ribs on both sides of his back. (He will not like me mentioning the fact that he was in pain, but I have injured my ribs and I know what it's like. It makes me appreciate his work on this project a hundred times more.)

At last the wall was ready for the vent hood. Trial runs demonstrated that it works beautifully. All that's left to do is order the stainless tiles I've chosen for the backsplash, and find some person to put them in place;

and for the roofers to make an opening through which the metal chimney pipe will run, then do whatever it is that professionals do to prevent rain from coming in and putting out the burners on which I am cooking smelly foods.

As of this morning, one side of the roof is now officially covered with metal. And somehow, despite the predictions of every purple sage in the neighborhood, it isn't raining. (Marye Crawford, mother of my most dearly beloved, please stop reading now. Trust me when I tell you this.)

At the moment, Floyd and a friend from the old house-building days are up on ladders on top of the roof working on the fireplace chimney. A wind like we are having this morning, and such as we shall have all winter, causes that metal pipe to rattle around in its faux chimney and send deep slamming echoes all through the house. Floyd's wanted to fix it since the first time he heard it, and it's just as well he's doing it while half the roof still has nice old-fashioned shingles to grip his boot soles.

I went out a few minutes ago to give him some fussing because despite our agreement he is not employing a tether. I'd just recently been talking to someone whose husband had taken a tumble from their roof. You know what'll happen to you if you fall on one of my shrubs, I threatened. He told me I'd have to yell at him at the hospital. What a card.

So the week has been all about projects. I should mention that the yo-yo delivering the sheet metal for the roof appears to have driven one wheel of his truck up over the curb and into the sidewalk garden. Fortunately, the greenery is so thick you can barely discern the damage; fortunately it is near the end of our growing season and within a few weeks all this will be frozen to the ground.

I cannot believe how calm and accepting I've been about this little maneuver. Old age must be good for something after all. Or it may be that a few weeks of house projects make every problem short of a sawed-off finger or a broken neck seem like no kind of problem at all.

*Its shelves are 21 inches wide and 27 inches deep, tall enough for me to need my kitchen ladder in order to reach the cereal shelf (the only place that allows lofty items like cereal boxes), permanently set into the walls at heights that prohibit stacking - for example - two cans of tomatoes atop one another. The doorframe narrows it even further. It must have been designed by the same person who designed our lower cabinets, with permanent shelves built in so that the tallest objects must be stored in front. I believe both were designed by the people preparing for the Affordable Care Act rollout, who had given up building and decided to go into programming.

Unruly Weather

It's Monday morning and I need to get myself to school, but thinking about last Saturday night is more fun. We weren't at a party or dancing downtown - you don't go downtown while the Austin City Limits  Music Festival is going on unless you savor driving alongside the inebriated and the out-of-town inebriated - we were spending the night sleeping off and on, directly under a storm cell that dumped up to a foot of rain in our area. It's been a long, long time since we've had a wild storm like that, with the near-simultaneous lightning and thunder, and the windows rattling in their casements.

In the morning our rain gauge was topped out at five inches, but we felt a whole lot more than that had fallen. The photo above shows a trash can outside the garage. By late afternoon, there was official confirmation that just over twelve inches had fallen close to our neighborhood. Zowie.

The French drain we'd installed a couple of years ago had done its job shooting water away from the foundation -

but the front and side yards were still a bog. Looks like we could do a bit more work in the drainage department.

There's nothing like a saturated Sunday to inspire sheer laziness, and I'm almost ashamed to admit I didn't venture out to take pictures till very late in the afternoon. I would have walked with Floyd and Travis to the greenbelt, where the creek was, well, you can only imagine; but my bad foot doesn't like to wear my rain boots for that much of a hike. I should have gone anyway. This is how our nearest entry to the greenbelt was greeting visitors:

The rush of water down the storm drain was torrential even fifteen hours after the storm. Around town, the usual assortment of dumb moves and sad stories were taking place, with people driving into low water crossings and standing shin-deep in their living rooms. Considering how many visitors were in town, I believe there were far fewer tragedies than such weather has brought about in the past. Credit must go to a bombardment of "Turn Around, Don't Drown" PSA's reminding people that just a few inches of water can sweep even your great big SUV hurtling to a bad downstream end.

Across the street, Travis and I surveyed one of his favorite "fetch" areas, where just the day before we'd had a good game:

I was relieved that the neighborhood's retention ponds were doing their job. In the lowest part of the 'hood, the management offices and the grounds surrounding them sustained quite a bit of damage when the creek came hurling through.

The drought has been so horrible that none of us dare complain, although the fact that more rain is forecast through this coming week is a bit nervous-making. I don't mean to get all egocentric or anything, but I did sign us up for a roof replacement a few weeks ago. I told Floyd I am really going to put my foot down with the roofers and refuse to let them start until things have really dried out. No matter how okay they are likely to say it is, putting a layer of metal onto a damp roof is a recipe for disaster in my humble layperson's opinion.

Think we'll be having a new roof by Christmas?

It's Been A Blast

One of the few written accounts of the events around Vesuvius that laid waste to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and surrounding towns nearly two thousand years ago was written by Pliny the Younger, nephew to the great scientist-author-naturalist-statesman-admiral. (Pliny the Elder was evidently a very busy man.) While his uncle rounded up the fleet and sailed straight toward the catastrophe, Pliny the Younger stayed behind and documented it. Apparently his descriptions were so accurate (rather than speculating about what the gods might be trying to say, as I probably would have done, he wrote down exactly what he was observing) that a certain type of volcanic eruption was named for him.

I wanted to compare current garden events to a Plinean eruption, but it seemed disrespectful to anyone in history who's ever experienced one: ash and gases shooting up to the stratosphere (!), spreading across the sky in the shape of a Stone Pine tree, then collapsing to create a deluge of pyroclastic flow. Everything and everyone in its path ends up incinerated and encased in rock.

It would have been kind of a stretch anyway, when all I'm trying to describe is an explosion of flowers and what I'll face in next month's clean-up.

All week I've been unable to stay in the house for more than a few minutes at a time. No matter what I'm supposed to be getting done, blue skies and sheer abundance pull me outside over and over. All I do is walk around the yard looking, noticing, being surprised. I get up at six a.m. and dither about until I have to rush out the door in time to make a noon appointment. This is one of the great things about gardening: I have no idea where time goes.

Looking around the yard now, I can't help but think about the early days of the sidewalk garden, after the tilling was done, the composting, the fun of planting. Up until then, all I'd ever done was dig holes in your typical Austin two inches of topsoil followed by six miles of rock. Being able to slip trowel or shovel into thoroughly prepared beds and just pop plants into the ground was sheer pleasure. I felt like a TV gardener.

However, I'd never faced a hundred-foot stretch of perfectly prepared growing medium, and it was pretty intimidating at first. Five long beds that were my first extensive experience with full sun. What would I plant?

My method was as follows: first and most obviously, I would select only native and well-adapted plants. Unlike the well-meaning but ill-advised people who'd owned the home before me, I wouldn't choose azaleas, for example. This isn't Dallas and we don't have acid soil. This is Austin, where the soil is alkaline and "acid" means something other than pH.

After a suitable amount of time daydreaming with my Texas garden books, it was off to the Natural Gardener (http://www.naturalgardeneraustin.com/). I started with the plants that would get big (although I never believe anything I plant will ever really thrive) - a pomegranate, the Mexican Bird of Paradise, Spirea, Texas sage, a few shrubby lantana. Then I went for scatterings of color: purple, red, yellow, pink, white. Each bed would get a random assortment of colors.

I knew I wanted lantana that would pour down over the curb, so every bed got some of them. I chose purple as you see, but I can tell you that the neighborhood is currently graced with waterfalls of lantana in every imaginable color. Thinking about it now, I might have chosen a stunning gold, or maybe even an assortment for a truly unruly effect. They were little four-inch-pot dudes when they went in the ground!

I wanted a scattered look, not an English garden. An autumn sage here, a purple salvia there, one of these, a couple of those.

Since the garden went in, only a few plants have failed to survive. Most of the deaths resulted from radical cutbacks to their water supply. For example, I had planted lavender in a moment of weakness, knowing it would want more water than I was ever going to give it. Last year I decided that I would only be putting in cactus, agave, yucca, and anything that grows out in the greenbelt. This year, as you no doubt recall, I planted lots of rocks.

Autumn is the time of year when we in Zone 8 plant our perennials, giving them time to savor what rain we'll have and to put down good roots before they have to put their energy into new leaves and flowers. It's a great time to fill gaps and try out a specimen you haven't experimented with yet. But yesterday I had to face reality: the sidewalk garden is full.

This is what three growing seasons can do:

I don't know what my neighbors must think when they look out their windows and see me walking up and down, up and down all day. I try to look pensive, as if I'm contemplating some great idea or working out a complicated writing problem, but really I'm just taking it all in. I see it all, multiple times a day; and I still find it hard to believe.

The approach along the sidewalk looks like a tunnel of greenery to me:

Looking closer, color after color after color:

There you have it: a blast of fall colors from Zone 8. Wish you could be here to see it. Wish you could stick around for the cleanup...

October

It's October.

As usual, it was difficult to believe that summer would ever end. And as usual, it has. First the light changes: you look out your window at a certain time of day and the sunlight is just different. It's gone from white-hot to yellow, and the clouds have softened around the edges. The sky is darker when you leave work at six or seven. Mornings and evenings are mild again. You can hear dead leaves skittering down the street, and the wind just might be out of the north. Moods brighten. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

Our afternoon temperatures are still sticking in the low 90's, but that's going to change in the next few days. I will miss the low 90's; that's my favorite temperature for biking. The air feels delicious on your skin and with a little exertion you can work yourself into the kind of sweat that makes you look and feel like an athlete. Frozen ears and fingers never really do that for me. (When it dips down into the 50's, I do believe I am freezing.)

After almost thirty years here I still can't decide whether central Texas seasons change gradually or all at once in the middle of the night. I guess we have a little bit of both. Summer seems to linger in a long stretch of hot days; we won't see bronze and gold foliage till almost Thanksgiving; but any morning now I'll step out the back door and want long sleeves.

Last week I took a walk around the block to see what's blooming. We're fortunate to have had rain, so there will be a big fall flowering before November arrives with our typical first freeze of the season. All the bees are busy and any day now the yard will be filled with butterflies on their way to wherever it is they go. 

I have to stand close to get a decent photo of my Esperanza, above, since it's wildly spindly despite full sun. I should be grateful it's alive at all; I put the little three-leafed thing in the sidewalk garden summer before last after we dug it up from the place in the back yard where the big steel planter box was going. Last year it only gave me one bloom but this year's performance has made me feel hopeful. Sometimes my inability to throw away even dead-looking plants pays off.

Next year I plan to experiment with some judicious pruning (scares me just to think about it) to see if I can get Esperanza and the Pride of Barbados to bulk up into bushiness rather than staying as tall and lanky as the basketball players in my class. Many gardeners in the 'hood have impressive results. I just hope they aren't the result of some of those chemicals at the big-box store that provide quick sustenance while seeping into the ground to contribute to algae bloom in our creeks and rivers. With all the great resources for organic gardening we have in Austin, it astounds me to see people pouring laboratory chemicals into their yards.

What a "real" Esperanza looks like

One of the best parts of autumn is the prospect of rain. Last weekend there were a couple of gully-washers and some people not too far from us had window-shaking thunder. Either we didn't have the electrical aspects of the storm or we slept through it, which seems unlikely. I was surprised when I got up Sunday morning to see this much rainfall. When you live in serious drought, water in a rain gauge is portrait-worthy.

Rain, Beautiful Rain

Just this morning I noticed that our Texas sage is covered with blossoms once again, and so told Floyd to plan this coming weekend accordingly. Isn't it exciting? I don't know whether the coming months will bring enough to save us from Level 3 water restrictions; the Highland Lakes are at only one-third of capacity. We took a drive out to Lake Travis the weekend of Floyd's birthday party and it was breathtaking to see this once vital body of water reduced to a series of sandbars ringed by parched cliffs. I couldn't even bear to take a photo. In any event, Level 3 restrictions would be fine by me.

The square-foot garden has been cleared out and planted with new basil, kale, and arugula. I can grow two out of three of those, anyway. Treated the new kids to water from the rain barrel, toting bucket after bucket across the back yard. My immediate plans include three more rain barrels, and I want long hoses on them. Half an inch of rain fills a sixty-gallon barrel at our house, and the City of Austin has just prohibited neighborhood associations from restricting rain barrel use. Until recently, putting a rain barrel in a visible location in our little piece of heaven has been regarded with a degree of horror generally reserved for opening a brothel next door to a day care center.

They love rain water best of all

Growing up in Connecticut, autumn meant riotously colored foliage and trips to the cider mill, where the smell of apples being crushed to pulp blended with the sweet fragrance of the cider, fallen leaves all around, and woodsmoke in the distance. I miss the redolence of that sort of autumn, but feel no urge to exchange it for the ability to plant a winter garden. It's as if down here in Zone 8 we are spared the level of death and desolation confronting colder regions, and so October doesn't come with that edge of looming melancholy.

It's still a jungle down here.

Mock me if you must, but I find it amusing to take pictures of wet plants. Not sure how the backyard pomegranate can have flowers and chubby globes of fruit at the same time, but I'm not complaining. It rather captures autumn around here: a moment when both ends of the growing season are in evidence.

It looks like most of the Queen's Tears bromeliad I divided in the spring are going to do fine, so I will leave some of them outdoors in a sheltered spot for the winter. Distributed into half a dozen pots and planters, they're not so heavy that I won't be able to hoist them into the little greenhouse if a serious freeze looms. The way our weather's going, we may have no freeze at all.

The rain has quite predictably excited all kinds of fungi. Some are pretty, some are downright creepy in my book. I'm just grateful Travis has no inclination to sample any of them. One specimen quite fittingly draped itself like a wet tissue in the Queen's Tears by the front door.

I spotted a very fluttery-looking cluster on someone's lawn:

And here are a few tender beauties from around our yard:

Although I know nothing about wild mushrooms and give them all as wide a berth as if they were nuclear waste, taking their pictures reminded me of a delicious pasta dish I had once at ASTI (http://astiaustin.com/) up in our old neighborhood. It was fresh tagliatelle in a delicate sauce of wild mushrooms sauteed with a bit of garlic and rosemary, finished with a splash of cream. Mmmmm.

Unlike the fungi, the yucca at the end of the driveway isn't fluttery-looking at all, of course. It looks like an assortment of vivid knives just waiting to stab you.

Oh. It is just an assortment of vivid knives waiting to stab you. How many times must I let myself be poked as I work around these guys, merely for the benefit of those stalks of white bells each spring?

Imagine my envy when I walked around the corner and saw what one neighbor's yucca is doing even at this end of the growing season. Despite its treacherous tendencies, I may have to think about more varieties of yucca, if I have any room to plant anything next year.

On Sunday while Floyd and Travis were hiking down to the creek, I wandered over to the gravel path leading into the greenbelt, figuring I might meet them on their way back. I don't like to admit it, but apprehension about rattlesnakes keeps me out of the woods for most of the year, especially when I'm on foot. I've encountered a number of rattlesnakes but never felt threatened until a neighbor was nearly killed two springs ago. I don't know how far into the greenbelt I would have walked, thinking that snakes might be out and about in search of dry ground.

No matter; bootless, I didn't walk very far along the gravel path anyway.

If I lived in those woods, I'd be looking for some dry ground too. It's October: the weather could do anything now.