end of the summer (i)

This morning's walk was a walk of dead things - nothing sad or sinister, but the mowers had been out slicing through weeds and foliage at the side of the roadways in Eldorado, lopping the odd tree branch here, beheading wild gourds there. Indeed, I thought that I'd be posting a picture of a half-pulverized gourd, but after yesterday's binge of spot-on photo taking in Indian Market, my gourd was out of focus, and hence itself a symptom of late-August tiredness. So this butterfly will have to stand in (and belongs, I note, in this summer's sequence of Yellow pictures).

From trying to pretend that there's lots of summer left I've moved precipitously to packing books into bags, wondering what I dare leave here, since transporting a whole lot of volumes back to NJ only to have them shipped westwards again at some future to-be-determined date seems a crazed exercise. And of course, since it's the end of August, all those tenure and promotion letters have started to wear a menacing expression (though I am a third of the way through ...). I've always loved the start of the autumn term / fall semester, since it's always seemed full of the promise of new starts and resolutions, but this one has a curiously unpredictable aspect to it.