winter's here!

Just kidding. Mostly. We had a hard frost last night. I was not expecting it, but I didn't listen to the radio all day either. Glenn woke me up at 5:30am to tell me. You'd have thought it was Christmas. For Glenn, frost means the official start to hunting season. Hence the twitterpations. I, however, was not so excited.

Everything is just about over in the garden. Tomatoes, beans, cukes...they're all little piles on browny-greeny mush. I can pick the tomatoes before tonight, and they'll mostly be ok, but just like last year, then I'll have 75 pounds of green tomatoes sitting in the kitchen and hosting the world's largest fruit fly convention. Bummer. What's more, now we have no reason to begin the projects we truly dread...putting the garden to bed. It's tiller time, which will be no small feat with the amount of weedage to be chopped up.

Although fall is my favorite season, there is always an element of melancholy to it. I think it makes me sad because here in Vermont, fall might last until Thanksgiving, or we might have snow in two weeks. You just never know. The days are already getting shorter. The glorious summer nights are over. Fog fills the Connecticut Valley, sometimes not burning off until noon. Mornings are in the thirties, but it's 75 degrees by the end of the work day. It's a incomprehensible season, erratic whenever possible, and I love it.

Because where else can you get a hard frost within thirty-six hours of swimming in the lake?