Tuesday - 207th

I could divide this day into two: farmette restlessness and Arboretum escape.

It's a beautiful day. You can't possibly hope for better. Sunny, warm, in fact more like late August or early September rather than mid-October. Sometimes Autumn throws us these surprises. We are grateful!

(One last lily bloom...)






Breakfast on the porch. For sure.






And we have another farmette job: to attack the pear tree in the young orchard. It's one of the few trees that has actually given us a bit of fruit this year. A couple of dozen pears. Here's the question though: when do you pick pears? In the old orchard, you know they're good when the first one falls to the ground. The rest can be plucked immediately after. If I may be honest, I don't care for the old orchard pears. The skin is tough, the rest is... variable. But in the young orchard, we were the planters and we picked varieties that would be tasty for sure. And now here we are, nearly midway into October and not a single fruit has dropped. So... when are they ready for picking?

Turns out there's a trick to this business. Pears do not ripen on trees. You have to pick them just before they're ripe! Now I want to know: what kind of an instruction is that? It's like giving the following driving direction: turn left about a mile before the gas station.

Further googling around tells us that if you lift the pear at a right angle to its growing position and it comes off readily then it's good to go. So today, we lifted lots of pears at right angles and determined that some of them were indeed good to go!






What happens next? -- I ask.

It seems that now you wait, keeping the "nearly ripe" (but not yet edible) pears in a cool place. So they're in the mudroom and we're waiting.


Now about my steps.... If you think Fitbit, the step tracking device, loads on the pressure to march and meet your goals, let me say that a brilliant day that comes just before winter is even worse. You can't stay home. You shouldn't stay home. Walk, take stock, look nature in the eye! You must get out!

But where to? The hiking trails (for example our favorite, cutting through the Brooklyn Wilderness Area) are not much fun during the hunting season. The local park -- well, we like to save it for a quick run on a busy day. So where do you look for Autumnal beauty?

We do have the Arboretum.

There is a lot to love there, especially in October. It's our destination for this day.

Yes, we're on the early side of seasonal color.  But still, it's there. Real beauty.












We linger for a longer while. Ed likes forest walks, so we veer off into the woods. The paths are quiet. If we run into the occasional hiker, we put on our masks, they put on theirs. We care. They care.

There's still a lot of green...






But plenty of gold too...






And of course, the occasional scarlet.







Oh, it would have been fun to finish the day with a drink at Finca Cafe, but we're still isolating and so instead, we go to a pharmacy that offers curbside flu shots. I mean, not quite a match for a moment at a coffee shop, but it's an outing and an adventure, no? Except, the pharmacy has run out, scheduled appointment notwithstanding. Tomorrow then? Maybe.


I make chili tonight. That's sort of a strange cooking choice for a very warm day, but we have the tomatoes and the beans and the big yellow pot hasn't had its moment on the stove for a while. Today it has its moment on the stove. And the smell of cooking chili is so good, and yesterday's vexing issues seem so far away...