This is only a portion of the mountain of peppers I rescued from frost on Friday night. I picked scores of them. That’s what happens when you go on vacation during harvest time.
We aren’t messing around with fall anymore, we intend to plunge headlong into winter. On Saturday morning, snow flurries drifted from the sky. Our first freeze warning on Saturday night did not mean the usual quick dip below 32 degrees either. On Sunday morning, the thermometer read 25 degrees. That’s 20 degrees below normal and cut off the growing season at the knees.
Our normal high this time of year is 67 and most of this week we’ll struggle to stay above 40. To add insult to injury, last year on this day we had a high of 83 degrees.
We’ve now had 15 days in a row of below-normal temperatures. We usually get a few nice days in October to clean up the garden, fertilize the lawn, mow one more time and put away the hoses until next spring, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen this year. The 15-day forecast (which of course can be WAY off) shows us in the 40s for 13 of the next 15 days. I decided during the sunny but chilly afternoon yesterday that I better mow one last time just in case it was my only chance. I wore gloves and a winter cap.
More disturbing was the critter that peered at me while I was mowing the backyard. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed movement in one of our birdhouses. Sometimes the sparrows try to use them as nesting boxes in winter, but this spring we put metal supports around the holes to prevent the woodpeckers from drilling them larger. There was no way a sparrow was going to squish through that metal hole. I turned off the mower and retrieved a stool (and my camera) for a closer look. That’s when I saw beady little brown eyes and a pair of tiny ears. This was no bird, but a mouse, and it’s living in a birdhouse 7 feet off the ground.
Look closely and you can see one of its little ears:
Perhaps it’s normal for a mouse to climb a 7-foot pole, I’m not sure. I do know that this is the first mouse in my yard to pick a “deeeeluxe apartment in the sky.”
If this is some kind of sign of what’s to come this winter, we better fasten our seatbelts, because it’s going to be a crazy ride.