The first day of fall

The weather turned this week to fall temperatures, just as the equinox approached.  It was a welcome change, although summer has been quite pleasant here.

The overnight temperatures dropped down in the 40°F's for a couple of days, low for this time of year.  I harvested basil, blending it with walnut oil for the freezer.  I'm planning to make reduced apple cider pancakes tomorrow for breakfast.  It's time.

Our neighbors' son sent us wonderful landscape photos from our Quebec garden yesterday and included a question about what might be maintaining the path in the far meadow that he'd mowed earlier in summer.  He thought maybe deer or foxes?

Deer, definitely not -- the red deer don't seem to venture out of Parc National du Bic.  But foxes, yes;  he liked that idea.  They're red foxes, dening down in our neighbor's lot, adjacent to our "orchard." Nice to think that they're following the mown trails down to the stream and back.

It's gotten quite nippy in Quebec, with frost warnings, so we encouraged him to use our vintage wood stove to heat things up in the morning, as happily for us, he's using our cottage to record his lectures for his far-distant college students.  So glad that we can provide our space for that.  

It's a wonderful space and I'm just glad to be able to have the old schoolhouse be a teaching space again, now in this time, too.

It's fitting, I think.

I sit at the dining table, when I write posts, and was planning to do Zoom presentations there too, if we were able to return in winter, looking more unlikely at this post.

And it's our vintage wood stove that keeps us warm then, although we also have energy-efficient convection wall heaters, too.