69/365 Summer's Over

They've all gone back to school. Fiona and Daisy are exhausted. I can see some of that in the other kids' faces. And summer 2010 draws to a close as we look forward to a weekend of back to school picnics and one last hurrah in the park: the International Festival.

I put the chalk up--not down in the basement like I will after the first frost, but in the closet in the front hall. The bikes still come out, but the jump rope has been hanging on a hook in the hall for two weeks. The pool is drained and is on its way to the alley for the next bulk pick up day. The galvanized steel won't make it another winter. We're going to regroup come the spring and try something new. I tore out the cucumbers and am not very hopeful that the tomatoes will ever produce. The morning glories and other crazier weeds got yanked off the fence and parking pad and stuffed into the yard waste dumpster.

I made a peach cobbler. That sounds like summer, maybe, but the strawberries are done, the blueberries are done, the blackberries are done, and we're in this thin slice of time between berries and apples.

I also got my first butternut squash through the CSA. I crock-pot cooked it overnight and scraped it into the food processor this morning. It's in the freezer now awaiting friends to turn into a massive pumpkin pie baking session sometime only too soon. Fiona scrunches her nose up but then remembers that pie is always optional, in a way that cubed squash baked with onions and beets or something terrifying like that is not.

The screened in porch is done except for painting the floor--that's this week's job. And then nights of breeze and increasing numbers of blankets and sleep-through-the-nights for Billy.

I had my coffee over ice today, and I will through the week (highs in the high 80s), but I bet it'll be back to coffee cups in September.

Bookbags and lunch boxes and "closed toe" shoes fill my hallway. I'm happy. I love the turn of the seasons, the tired old lazy summer giving way to crisp regimented autumn. Ah.