Snapshots: Ready for Winter and Holding Onto Summer

A. brought home a cord of cedar that needed to be stacked. It's still a marvel to me that we have children who can do that now.

The three younger ones did all of this in about an hour.

And the oldest took care of the pile by the door and some kindling. He will also be on call to split more kindling as needed.

I had thought about paying them to do this this year, but then they came in and asked if they could have a cookie. So they each got three cookies, one for each face cord of wood in a cord. There are those low standards coming in handy again.

Every year our school gets a visit from the New Mexico mobile museum. It's an RV with displays about different themes every year. This year it was agriculture, so all about crops and so on. There was this little New Mexico kitchen that all the kids loved.

It was pretty neat.

Poppy went for a walk the other day and came home with these things to be displayed.

I have taught her to see the beauty in weeds, which may be my most important legacy.

Meanwhile, on the dining room table . . .

A burst of summer at the start of fall.

Most of the sunflowers are gone now. There's only one good patch still in our ghost village, so those might be the last sunflowers and sage on the table until next year.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.