I set the day aside to finally restore the house to it’s pre-Sandy condition; un-batten the hatches if you will. I had a list made over breakfast: put the deck furniture back, plug in everything in the basement, get my office computer back on, hit the dump, hit the hardware store, and then possibly set aside some time to balance the checkbook. You know, Saturday as HoneyDo Day (but then, this is my list, so MeDo? AndrewDo? whatever).

In the process, of course, I did snap a few pictures.

Instagrammed shot of our Japanese maple, taken from the top of the deck. We never prune the thing as much as we’re supposed to, and so it encroaches on the rest of the garden. But it retains it’s color until late in the season, so I like it anyway. Obviously the X-Pro II filter punched the colors up, but it’s a difference of degree:

A wider shot, full of the grey that autumn always brings:

I took these from the deck, that’s a post in the corner there.

The dump got into the spirit of the season much better:

I don’t know what it is, but I like this time of year precisely for its pale gloom. Autumn is a time to reflect and reconsider, to watch as quiet creeps over the land. Winter is of course a miserable depressing darkness, but Autumn is filled with light, even if it’s a light we find more interesting for it’s faded glimmer.