That most wished-for period of fall has arrived: Indian Summer. And we thought it had forgotten us. Not so, it has returned faithfully for yet another interregnum, a blissful farewell to summer, to remind us never to lose hope. Oh yes, fall and winter have their good moments, they too give us pleasure, but we so miss the proverbially lazy, hazy days of summer, spontaneity, warmth, outdoor living, leisure, and above all the sight of our beloved gardens, the beauty of growing things, the flowers that capture our eyes and our admiration.

The irony is that this day, the second in a series of warm, breezy, sunny days that will stretch into a week's-worth of deliverance from the icy cold, blasting winds and snow that briefly visited us only last week, is the very day that gave us the final opportunity to close up the garden for good. Empty all the large garden pots of their soil into the garden beds and borders, upturning and storing the pots to be covered with a tarp that will protect them from the build-up of snow and ice and consequent freeze-and-that that is so inimical to the preservation of the pots.

The garden urns, stationery, to remain where they are, and each one will be covered by its own plastic shroud for the very same reasons as the glazed pottery is covered; to preserve them from cracking as a result of water freezing and threatening the structural integrity of the cast stone. It all looks so dreary, but that's how it is, season-to-season. 

After breakfast my husband went out to begin the work, raking up leaves, emptying the pots, assembling and storing them. I joined him soon afterward to work in the backyard, raking, clearing out my little garden shed of containers no longer needed, and then joining him at the front of the house to help wherever I could. We've always worked well as a tandem, in this as in all things in life.

In between, we broke off because Jackie and Jillie scolded us that we were wasting a perfectly lovely day that we could be enjoying in the forest, so off we went, on a day so warm that no one needed a jacket, a sweater, the sun-kissed atmosphere beyond merely pleasant. On this perfect Indian Summer day the leisure and pleasure of being alive and appreciating everything around us couldn't have been more acute.

Strangely enough, but perhaps because it was just around lunchtime, few other people were out on the forest trails. We're out at any time of the day, including when people normally set aside an hour or so for lunch simply because we never eat lunch. We find that two good meals a day suits us just fine. It's what Jackie and Jillie are accustomed to, just as we always have been, particularly since our retirement. For me, as a young mother of three infants, lunchtime was just too busy feeding them to have the opportunity to feed myself, and I simply dispensed with it. Eventually years later, my husband decided he too no longer wanted lunches, and there it is.

It's just one thing during the day we have unaccustomed ourselves to. Finding it interferes with plans to attend to other things. For us, it's a time-waster, though people think it's odd or comical, it works well for us. And on this most wonderful of days making our way through the trial network of the forest landscape, we couldn't have asked for a more pleasant ambience. The sun retreated on occasion behind a curtain of steely clouds, but when it returned it did so with brilliant assertiveness, so bright that the forest appeared as a silhouette of trees before it.