September Gold

September is gold.

Golden light, golden weather.

Our yard is all goldenrod and black-eyed Susans,

evening primrose, and these tiny golden asters

The vestiges of summer are being left behind

--the mornings are crisp and cool, and you go into them expecting to be chilled, but find yourself shedding layers, and spending the day outdoors, warm and completely unmolested by flies or mosquitoes.  

And the harvest is coming in.

We have dozens of wild apple trees on and around our property. Some years they barely produce anything at all, and some years there is a bumper crop. This is one of those years. C and the boys have been picking them, and then roasting the apples with spices in the solar oven and milling them up into apple sauce to freeze for the winter ahead. Our house smelled like apple pie all weekend.

Other bumper crops this year: potatoes (the boys just dug them up today, and they are huge!), green beans (we heroically ate our way through two or three gallons of them before everyone dug in their heels and I froze the last gallon or so), garlic, tomatillos, poblanos! Not so good are the tomatoes, which is sad, but you can't have it all, I suppose.

The leaves are just starting to change, and I'm feeling at peace with it. Letting go a bit of my death grip on summer. Though I do want to take one last trip to the beach this year.

 Z found a gold-and-black monarch caterpillar just before Labor day weekend. We put it in a jar with some milkweed and by the time we came back from camp, it had spun a gilded chrysalis. And then we waited, and waited. E and Z learned about monarchs at school, including that it only takes ten days for the caterpillar to become a butterfly, and they became quite distraught when ours hadn't emerged by day 10.

But this morning, we could see its wings through the chrysalis, and by this afternoon, a butterfly appeared.

Z released it on one of the snapdragons he planted back in May, which gave the whole experience a lovely symmetry.

We hope it can make it all the way to Mexico before the cold weather sets in.

I hope your September is golden too, and that you're finding magical transformations all around.