Season’s Change

Turning the page on the calendar seems to have turned the season from summer into fall...Vacations have ended, school has started, I can only hope that Indian Summer will re-appear once the weather gets this little bout of rain out of its system and the dust—literally—settles.

I will admit that shortly after the wedding was over I became a bit lax with the lawn and garden up keep. Watering the grass seemed like a lot of work and if you don’t water in the heat the only things that will continue to grow will be the dandelions and then why waste the gas lopping off the dandelion heads when they will only pop right back up as soon as you pass over them?

I did keep on watering my beautiful flowers, and immediately following the wedding the sunshine made them even lovelier. However, I did not keep up the stinky-spray-every-week schedule and the elk took full advantage. The wildflower gardens began to look more like an elk dance floor as the varmints searched for any delicacy I might have missed applying the spray to and stomped the rest of the flowers flat. I got even with them by pretending not to care and focused solely on my flowerpots.

When my flower pots were due for the monthly application of stinky spray it was raining...and I bet you can guess how this story ends...pots have been eaten bare, or pulled up, or dumped over.

This time of year it seems that elk appetites go into hyper overdrive and they eat EVERYTHING, no matter what. My once full flowerbeds that hosted the wedding ceremony are now empty of blooms, containing only a few leafless stalks of phlox and one clump of something that this year’s elk seem to find repulsive--- as it’s about the only thing they haven’t eaten.

Yet.