This is what my shoes looked like the other morning after walking through my dew-laden grass.

Fall-ish leaves stuck to my shoes. Not something you would expect in the middle of August now is it? With our dry conditions this summer some of our trees are showing stress and dropping leaves early. I am not sure what this means for our fall colors this year. Hopefully the colors will still be good, although I am anticipating them to be earlier than usual. Normally they are at their peak around October 17. Since we will be taking our annual trip to our cabin in Colorado in a few weeks and returning the first week of October, I hope we don’t miss the show. We are hoping to catch the aspens changing at the cabin and then our New Jersey fall when we return.

I think we’ve broken the dry spell. Since yesterday morning when we shopped in the pouring rain at the farmer’s market to right now we’ve had a little over 4 inches of rain! And it’s still raining. It rained pretty much all day yesterday and it’s been raining since I got up. Any more and we are going to have to let water out of the pool! Our thirsty grass and plants have got to be happy. Drowned by now probably. I can hear the rush of water in our little creek behind our house from the deck. When this stops I am going to walk down and see just how much water it is carrying.

The wildlife is feeling fall in the air too I think. We hardly ever have deer in our yard although they frequent our neighbor’s yard quite a bit. When I looked out the other day in the late afternoon I saw this little family group in my front yard. A young buck with nubs for antlers, two does and a fawn. Please forgive the bad photos—they were taken through the screen and window.

They were flighty and hard to capture with the camera. I just love the color of our deer. They are not brown; more like a rich butterscotch color.

Not ten minutes after the deer were in my yard the turkeys came.

We see turkeys pretty much every day. We have three little groups that visit. One hen by herself, one with three babies and a larger grouping of hens and assorted size babies. They seem to be everywhere this year! HAH! I just looked out to see what the rain was doing and the same group of turkeys is out in front! Pretty wet turkeys I might add.

August is a funny month here. You would think that August would be the hottest month, but it’s not. July is. Right about mid-August it starts to change. The pool starts to tank on us seemingly overnight. Before we left for the shore last weekend we were swimming every night in luscious 82 degree water. When we returned four days later the temperature had dropped to 76/78 at best. Even though we’ve had warm days and nights this past week the temperature hasn’t budged. Now with all this rain it’s sure to bring it down even further. The sun is just not hitting it for the better part of the day. It’s sad but we’ve had a good run with the pool this year. In fact, probably the best pool year we’ve had. It’s beautiful at night, isn’t it?

In fact the whole summer has been wonderful. A little hot maybe, and we’ve certainly had our fair share of humidity; but it was all good. Given that, I am ready for cooler sleeping weather and the crisp air and golden light of fall. Instead of sitting around the pool with the tiki torches glowing at night, soon we’ll be sitting around the wood stove watching the glowing coals of wood.

Let the seasonal shift begin!