We live in California, so the first day of Autumn (just three days away now) only rarely looks classically Autumnal. Other states’ expatriates who come to live here sometimes complain that we Californians don’t get four seasons; we get only two, winter and summer. But those of us who’ve lived here a long time, even in the Central Valley, can spot the signs of the turning wheel.

Mornings are cool now; my kids head out the door to school wearing sweatshirts, but not for long. Days are warm and blissfully, perfectly temperate—no longer do you walk outside at 4 p.m. and feel the uneasy sensation that the heat is cooking your brain within your skull.

Late summer. Hot days, breezy nights—if we’re lucky. Even as we’re celebrating the fruits of the harvest—our glorious, ripe tomatoes, those massive zucchini squashes—we see signs of withering, of longer nights, of exhausted energy. Everything in my garden looks a little parched, a little fried, a little worn out. I don’t know about you, but for me this season is always one of change and a paradox of celebration and mourning.  It’s easy to see signs of wear and tear, of life well lived.

Striped canna leaves are looking a trifle scorched, even though this plant is largely in the shade and it has been a mild summer.

My day lilies have bloomed their hearts out for three solid months. Now they’re anemic. Their last, valiant effort is to produce seed pods.

The hydrangeas are papery and drying. They make lovely dried flowers, but I usually cannot bear to cut them.

My coral-colored cannas are doing a fine job of producing seed pods …

… from which these shiny, black, pea-sized seeds can be gathered. I’m hoping to propagate some this way. I’ll have to do more research.

At the beginning of July, these seed “lanterns” from my goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) were a vivid chartreuse. Now they’re crackly and bronze.

Rose hips are bulging in the sun. Few roses are braving the heat these days.

I’m mourning the loss of three more birch tress that are slowly dying, just as three others did last year. I love these trees. They were a gift from my mother and Ian and I planted them the first year we owned this house. For a long time they were the only landscaping we could afford to do. I’ve watched these trees grow, season after season, through my bedroom window. When Asher was a tiny baby and I was sick and then recovering in bed, I watched the white branches get their leaves, which fluttered in the breeze day after day. I love the way their late-afternoon shadows dance on my window and blinds. For now, the lower branches still have leaves and from my window they’re still beautiful. They are dying from the top down.

These photos aren’t the most beautiful. They don’t show the garden in its best possible light. But I like them anyway. Change happens and the best we can ever do is to embrace it and find the beauty in it.

We had a good time at Grandma and Grandpa’s house last weekend. We celebrated Grandpa’s 65th birthday with family, watched the kiddos swim, and ate delicious barbecued ribs, corn on the cob, salad, and other goodies.

I couldn’t help myself—I just had to snap some shots of Grandma’s garden, in all its August glory.

Gaillardia flowers, still chugging away, blooming and then drying out in the Central Valley heat.

Grandma’s hollyhocks and twisty morning glories are gorgeous. We found this strange blue flower blooming in her tree!

Grape vines that try to take over the world—I always hope to capture the color of the light through the leaves, but the photo never quite does it justice.

Toward evening, the morning glories fold up for the night.

A baby sea monster rose out of the greenish depths of Grandma’s pool.

Back home again, I found some pretty pink clouds in the evening sky.

Lucas off to camp, Daddy off to work. Me and Asher with all kinds of time for …

chalk drawings on the patio,

inspection of garden flowers,

and the study of sun and shadow, curves and lines and points …

for free-ranging hens, like Avalanche here,

and for growing pumpkins, green and ghostly white,

for purple morning glories, cana seed pods,

and corn in the morning light. How do we know when it’s ripe?

It’s August, so the crepe myrtles are blooming, bursting!

We’re busy, so the playroom needs sweeping. A million precious things scattered a million different places.

And then the blocks simply must come out to play,

and Mommy simply MUST work a tad.

“Bob the Builder” is fun for Asher. Chapter 8 is not so fun for Mommy.

The leftover Ciro’s pizza simply MUST be Lunch.

“I will take my nap on the couch. For ONE minute. And then you wake me up and say, ‘Asher, it’s time to wake up to play!'”

Mia’s Apple Tree

Cameleon Was A Spy

I’ll be damned! He is asleep on the couch, just like he promised.

More of Chapter 8 in the hush of the sleeping preschooler, who,

miracle of miracles!

awakes with a smile and gentle

pat, pat, pat footfalls,

bear in hand.

We fetch Lucas from summer camp, where he wove a tiny rug.

“When can I go to big-boy summer camp?” Asher asks. Again.

“Buckle up, boys. We’re going to the library,”

where they cannot see the books for the computer that has kid games and a candy-colored keyboard.

But the Carmichael Library is newly remodeled and lovely, as is evident in the rotunda. Mommy wants to take more pictures, but then feels too much like a weirdo.

There’s also too much bickering between Asher and Lucas over the computer, so Mommy decides to check out.

Three books for boys, three books for Daddy.

We visit Great-Grandma and Great-Aunt, who are fine and old and loving and mysterious and bored until we arrive.

They don’t believe we have chickens.

Home again, we collect the day’s eggs. The green ones are lucky, don’t ya know.

And “Toy City” grows and grows some more.

For dinner, tasty snapper, spinach, snap peas, garden tomatoes, à la Daddy.

Sundown.

There’s still time for chicken ranging, feeding, and holding,

for watering the garden,

for watering the boys, giddy and nekkid, screeching and laughing.

“MY FOOT! I stepped in chicken poop!”

Shivering.

Shower. Teeth. Jammies. Stories. Lotion for eczema. Songs. Cuddles.

“You check on us?”

“Oh yes.”

We parents are sometimes allowed to sleep until 7:30 a.m. It has been happening more often lately, especially after a particular recent blowup over the unneccessary waking of Daddy at 5:30 a.m., which seems to have made a difference. Some mornings we wake to find our boys peacefully looking at books on the living-room couch. Other mornings we wake to hear them fighting over something that they both want. We were just telling some friends that lately, more often than not, our mornings have been gentler.

This morning, there was too much excitement in the air. Asher marched around the house shouting, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake UP!” Lucas was a little subtler, quietly saying, “Oh my! Look what the Tomato Fairy has brought us!” He had to repeat it a few times before his sleepy parents clued in.

We came out to the kitchen to find this bounty, this glorious Lughnasadh gift from the Tomato Fairy. (I had no idea there was such a fairy! Imagine my surprise!) There on green and yellow silks rested gorgeous tomatoes from Lucas’s garden, harvested at their peak in the early morning stillness. A little note from the Tomato Fairy reads, “For The Wilson 18 tamatoo.” I’ve never seen anything cuter.

A few of these were eaten with breakfast, then I took the rest outside where the light was better. My little 8-year-old gardener is pleased as punch. Now I’m on the hunt for the perfect dinner recipe for these beauties.

Happy First Fruits!

Lucas is pretty sure that these chickens are meant to be lap chickens—at least Midnight.

Avalanche and Snowdrift graze in the backyard. The hens are enjoying morning and evening ranging hours. Alas, they are displacing the mulch in my flowerbeds a lot. I’m wondering if I could coax them to the school field two doors down and back again (but I would be afraid of off-leash dogs).

Lucas’s garden is about to overwhelm us with juicy red tomatoes. Just this week they are turning red.

A magical moment at Sacramento Waldorf School just before the summer camp play began. The oak tree at the Oak Stage is magnificent.

A backyard visitor graciously paused for my photo. I’m pretty stoked about this shot.

Evening picnics on the lawn are fun. There’s a bit of sandwich-eating, a bit of snuggling, a bit of wrestling, a bit of coaxing the hens to eat out of our hands, and …

… a good bit of airplane rides with Daddy.

We are having full, full days with summer camp and day care and work for Mom and Dad.

Today there was a play performance at summer camp. Lucas was a tax collector in the “Dragon with Thirteen Tails,” performed on the Oak Stage at Sacramento Waldorf School. We also got to see a gymnastics demonstration, as the children have been doing movement and assorted gymnastics in the awesome gym.

Some days, to get out of the heat, we play with puzzles.

And with chalk in the cool morning.

Lucas goes to piano lessons on Wednesdays. This week he noodled around until he figured out the first part of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” When he told his piano teacher, Mrs. Tan, she helped him work on it and learn the next little bit. I love that she goes with his interests!

We swim at Grandma’s and Papa’s house, and at swim team practice and swim lessons. Only four more of those are left!

We watch our garden grow—the things we planted …

… and the things we didn’t, like this volunteer sunflower!

And we watch and care for the chickens. Oh, how they are enriching life around here! Our first week of chicken farming has been going well. We’re all fascinated by them.

At first the chickens slept on the ground in a cuddle puddle, all higgledy-piggledy, piled on top of one another in the corner of the chicken run. They hadn’t gotten the lay of the land yet, I think. Gradually they are claiming this new space as their own. Ian had to pick them up one night and put them on the roost inside the chicken coop, but after that, they seem to get it. Last night we found them roosting just where they’re supposed to be (where it’s safest), without any help from us.

We gathered sixteen eggs in the first four days, after that, I lost count. They are averaging almost four eggs per day. They eat pretty much ALL of our kitchen scraps, including milk leftover from the boys’ morning cereal (for the calcium). I didn’t know chickens drank milk, did you?

The eggs taste wonderful!

Some blessings for counting:

1. Organic strawberries with lunch
2. Air conditioning
3. Hobbies and art to enliven and enrich life
4. Potty-training successes—finally!
5. Blueberry flavored iced-tea
6. Automatic chicken watering devices (like a drinking fountain for chickens)
7. A bumper crop of giant green tomatoes
8. Doors that begin opening as soon as others start closing
9. My brilliant, loving husband
10. Spiders sitting smack in the middle of their webs

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.”   —Ada Louise Huxtable

Makeshift leaf bandage, fashioned by Lucas to heal his little brother’s hurt knee

Pumpkin vines and roses love hot, hot days

Morning glory heart-shaped leaves are as precious as the flowers

A surprise magnolia blossom on my tulip tree

Asher’s interpretive dance with Mardi Gras beads and stick

Blueberries for pie!