Autumn is counting down, cycling through shining reds and brilliant golds under the bluest skies we’ll see all year.  It’s hard to believe all this fire will soon burn out, leaving only the hard edges of dark, bare branches waiting for the snow to find its way to us.  Summer’s warmth lingers in the colors, as if the trees are wearing on the outside their remembered pleasure of those sweet and easy days.

Saturday the community garden closed for the season.  So, I dug up the cosmos, with their inch-thick stems, and pulled out the lily-pad nasturtiums that have grown so fast in these cool and sunny weeks.  It was strange to see the plot reduced again to its 10×10 dimension.  Hope had made it large with petals and leaves.  And next year fits into that space already, in seed packets and bulbs I brought home Saturday afternoon.

Aside from germinating the seeds and keeping down the weeds, I didn’t even try to do a good job at the garden.  I didn’t even want to.  Instead, I wanted to enjoy how something might happen in its own way, and to let it be outside my control.  I suppose that is another way of saying I wanted to trust something.  And what all those seeds turned into – I’ll be thinking about that for a long time.