Getting ready for winter

It was a glorious weekend. As I looked up and down Second Street (Fort Frances) on Saturday and Sunday, I couldn’t help but notice how many people were taking advantage of the two days to get their yards ready for winter.
The musty smell of leaves filled the air on Saturday. The golden colours of birch, ash and maple leaves covered the ground. At the cottage, the brown pine needles from the white and red pine are now covering the ground.
As the day wore on, people began raking those leaves and filling leaf bags from their lawns.
The drone of lawnmowers could be heard into the twilight of Sunday evening as leaves were being mulched and then raked.
The stillness and quiet of the lake on Saturday, was frequently punctuated by the sound of an outboard motor. Others were making the trip to their cottage. It has been several weekends since the sun had shone and the winds had died. The weekend before, there were only two vehicles parked at the marina. Saturday afternoon there were over a dozen.
Second Street was busy, as trucks pulling boats on trailers passed by Sunday. For many families, it marked the last weekend at the cabin. That meant water lines were drained, fridges were emptied, and food stuffs that had filled the cupboards throughout the spring and summer were brought down from the lake.
Occasionally, a large moose in the back of a half ton or on a trailer drove past me as I was washing my wife’s vehicle.
Fall was clearly in the air. The signs were everywhere.
In our back yard, a large grey squirrel seemed to be everywhere searching out food. It has been spending a lot of time under the spruce trees picking out the seeds from the cones that fell this summer. The squirrel has grown from being a fairly skinny animal to being quite fat with a thick grey coat in the last month.
I will begin cleaning up the flower beds and removing the stocks that held the lilies through July and August. They have now turned brown, and have separated from the bulbs that are in the ground. This fall I have planned to plant a bunch of tulips and other bulbs to have a showy spring.
I didn’t get the leaves raked in the yard, nor the grass mowed. I am hoping for another warm weekend to do the cleaning up. Really I am hoping that most of the leaves will have fallen so that I only have to rake once.
It probably won’t happen that way since a large Silver Maple that sits under a street lamp won’t shed its leaves until the last moment before the snow flies.
Walking around the house on Sunday, we discovered that several windows need a touch up of painting. I’ll have to get to that in the next week. Like the squirrel who was constantly looking for food on Sunday for winter, I too have a lot of work ahead of me for winter.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher