The Autumnal Equinox

 “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

― Terry Pratchett

Oy Vey.......this year. I don't even really know what to say at this point, the flower bulbs season was good and then it was over and even more hell broke loose then covid. My beloved santiam canyon burnt to the ground, fueled by a freakish September Wind storm, the likes of which I've never seen in my 40 years here,  filling the valley with air so toxic it couldn't be measured with the standard metric chart. For days it was like living on Mars, the voles were out in the middle of the day because it was so dark that it seemed like perpetual twilght, I watched the cat catch 7 of them in the half hour after noon.  When the non stop lightning storm finally ushered in the rain and washed out the air, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. I sit here feeling like I'm doing that brainstorm exercise in that writers workshop I took when I got divorced, the one where the instructor said write down 3 random ideas and then connect them with a string of consiousness. This feels almost made up, but it actually happened and it's been that kind of a year where you just seem to be saying it can't possibly get any worse but it does get worse and then it gets worse than that and then it gets worse than that. 

If it weren't for the flowers it would be even darker. 

Zephyranthes grandiflora

Colchicum 'Rosy Dawn'

Gladiolus in the border

Crocosmia in the late summer flower beds

Colchicum variegatum

The gladiolus as the sunsets on the autumnal equinox

So I walked around on the equinox and took some photo's of a few flower bulbs blooming in the garden, the rain has freshened thing up a bit and the green is starting to return to the landscape with the cooler nights now. 

Mark