Tucson in the Fall

We spend May and June and July inside.  There are few outdoor events of note, and those that do exist begin after the sun sets, or just as it rises.  Like January in the Northeast, the outdoors is there to be examined but not explored.

Then, with the cooling monsoon and the start of a new school year, performers begin to wend their way to our little corner of the desert.  As the fruits ripen, a day trip to Apple Annie's Orchard is called for.  There's wine country to the north and to the south, but I've tasted Arizona wines and .....

My yard is showing the effects of neglect; I'm still trying to work out the kinks in the irrigation schedule and the dessicated little leaf cordia reproaches my efforts as I drive by each morning.  I seem to drown it or starve it, and fertilization only seemed to make it worse.  I've decided to ignore it until the winter time, when it will be cool enough for the snakes to disappear.  Then, I will take myself and my trowel and my garden books out there, make a little nest for myself on my Cornell kneeling pad, and see if I can figure out what to do.

I bought a fall wreath at Michael's yesterday, just because it was marked down 60%.  TBG's not usually a fan of faux floral arrangements, but this one made him smile. It's happily ensconced on the little gate to the courtyard,

announcing that fall is here.

I hired Mr 9 & 11 and their friend, Good Will Hunting, to help me adorn my house.  They carried boxes and unwrapped carefully and made decisions on location and arrangement and I emptied my dishwasher.  "She lets us put stuff wherever we want," Mr 11 had informed Good Will as we drove to my house.  "It's really fun AND she pays minimum wage."

Only in middle school would that seem like a treasure.

After so many years of creating "the look,"

 it didn't take any supervision  

to get the scarecrow just right. 

After they left, I rearranged the inside (slightly), and stood back, surprised. Putting away the decorations last year, I tossed everything which was damaged.  No more positioning that candlestick so that the chipped piece doesn't show; into the trash it went, along with the wrinkled papers covering the bottom of the box.  Once, they were beloved, second grade art work.  Two decades later, they were trash. 

That left me with quite a hole in my decorative arsenal this year .

I had all these little toys, and nothing appropriate to contain them. 

A quick trip to Michael's and they were contained.

It is a curiously functional accessory; there's nothing "fun" about how or where it was purchased.

That makes it an outlier in my collection.

 

I had disposed of the half melted candles which usually light the first few nights of the month until I get to the store for new ones.  I decided to use the tea lights I bought at Ikea last year; 100 of them in a flimsy plastic wrapper for a ridiculously low price.  I put the purchased-that-same-day-at-Ikea white tapers in the Halloween candelabras and it's really not any less celebratory. 

 

I'm making my own Fall outside, even if, to you in colder climes, this does not look like October:

There are concerts in the park on Saturday nights

and cool weather crops in the containers and the Heavenly Bamboo is turning red.  The changes are subtle, but they are here.   Turn off the air conditioning, open the windows, and bring on the long sleeve shirts.  It's fall in the desert.