It's been a couple of days since I posted, and life here has been busy.

We headed out to do a little exploring the other day, and ended up at a deserted coal mine deep in a very dense and quiet forest. The road in was not for the fainthearted or any low-slung cars, and after seeing bear tracks like this one in the mud, I'm sending all good thoughts out to the bears and cubs for them to make it through this next threatening season.



Now, here's where being from central Jersey serves me out here, making all things constantly astonishing: back where I come from, leave a candy wrapper at the end of your driveway and undoubtedly someone will come along, fall over it and hello, lawyers. Out here, what delights me is that right there in the middle of the woods is an isolated, abandoned coal mine shaft, a dark, spooky, watery tunnel and that's just the way it is. Kind of an enter at your own risk thing. I like that.



Now, I'm a pretty cautious person when it comes to physical risk. I'm not an adrenal injunkie by any stretch of the imagination, and so my foray into this mine shaft was a brief one, especially since we were out in the middle of nowhere, in active bear territory, with no cell service and no one around for miles. Ahem. Not to mention I was once again wearing useless sandals.



I couldn't stand upright, even at the mouth of it, and the air coming out of there was frigid. It was DARK and if I'd been wearing wellies I might have inched back a little further but not by much. Very spooky place, with coal dust and lumps all over.



We;ve also been doing some winterizing because the temp dropped to about 47 the other night and that was really chilly. I got my first load of wood delivered and right now I'm trying my hand at oven-drying some of the garden tomatoes. Plus, I'm going to go grab all the green ones and pickle them because I love pickled green tomatoes with red beans and rice. They nullify the hot sauce.

We made a lovely fire in the fireplace -- first one of the season -- and Ellie, one of the cats, spent the next five hours stretched out on the rug in front of it, in complete and total bliss.

We released the five original monarchs successfully, so hopefully they're on their way to Mexico, but on our way back from the coal mine I found a promising patch of milkweed, and found five more caterpillars in various stages of growth. So we resurrected the butterfly house and now I'm waiting for them to eat their way into butterrfly-hood in time to make it to Mexico before the real cold weather sets in. This one's going to be close.

Today is 9/11, and despite all this chattering I feel really quiet inside, and sad. Today is one of a handful of days in my life when I can remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing, when the world changed.

I remember the disbelief, the pain, tears and the vast, empty sky. And the faces of the lost, and those who lost. All of us.

Peace.