Today is the epitome of a perfect fall day. The sun is shining with that sharp glint it seems to have only in the fall and winter. The temperature is in the mid 50’s. A small breeze is blowing. Some trees still have color, but others have brown leaves clinging ever so slightly. The last of my flowers are still in bloom. The rest of the garden is filled with brown stalks. Soon they too will be gone as it is close to clearing the garden time. The deck is still open but I’ve called Skip to come and cover the furniture and the umbrellas and stow away the candles and decorations which made the deck so inviting last summer. I think when winter comes I miss the deck most of all.

When I was in elementary school, in the lower grades, art was mostly cutting and coloring. I remember coloring leaves. On a single piece of paper, there were a few outlines of leaf shapes each with a vein down the middle. We’d color them with our crayons then cut them out using those little scissors which always seemed to get stuck on my fingers. The leaves were yellow or red as all the real leaves were. After we’d cut them out, we’d paste them on construction paper to make a collage. I remember the paste seemed to get on everything, including my fingers. We used a round bottle of paste which had a brush attached to the top. I could never get just the right amount of paste on the leaves. Sometimes the leaves stuck to my fingers and when I pulled them off, the leaves stuck to my other fingers. My collage took a long time to finish, and sometimes the back of the paper was wet from the paste leaking through. I’d wave it in the air hoping it would dry. I always put it between books when I was going home or it would curl.

My mother made a big deal of my art work. I beamed.