oh, autumn, you make me swoon

It's so beautiful as we settle into the briefest of autumns.  Here's the sumac of my blog's namesake, which makes me swoon.  I'm hoping to harvest some for one of my first home dyes, but I'm moving so slowly in gathering the outside materials:  the mordants, the afterbaths, the actual fiber. 

In the meantime, I'm enjoying simply being outside and breathing the fresh air.  Winter is so stinking long here in Minnesota, and I know this is the place I call "home" (after a decade in Tennessee, then a half-decade or so in Wisconsin, Minnesota is now the longest place I've ever lived, and this address is the one I've had the longest of any other)--I still surprise myself every time I find myself missing snow.  Where is the Southern girl in me?  I think she's completely and utterly gone. 

Again, we didn't go camping this summer, which I regret.  Again, I didn't register our canoe and get it out, which I also regret.  But, there is always next summer! 

August and early September are so lovely for all of the wildflowers.  The little asters, the showy goldenrod.  We have to remember all these things when the landscape gets a bit grey.

The mushrooms have been pretty fantastic lately too:  one the size of my hand!  We collected some acorns, hoping no squirrel would come down and shake its mighty fist at us.  We watched for walnut trees to help my bucket (but a week later, our patio was swamped from our neighbor's tree, so I was a bit anxious without need).

The second picture of this lichen is my favorite photo of the day, though I love the ones of my family too.  I just have a thing for this yellow and this pattern of varying circles and oh, autumn, you make me swoon.

And I saved two pictures of us for this post too.  I've decided to be judicious, for the most part, about public sharing (as opposed to my private family blog) of my family, but sometimes I just love the people that are with me too much to not share.  Here's my bear with her papa, the love of my life, and then he took a photograph of me nursing Finn, and I hesitate to include it, since there's that whole bearing-all thing, but it was just one of those moments.  Ryan took the camera and shot randomly (with a macro lens, no less) and at that moment, Finn decided to pull my shirt up, the little punk, and I kept trying to tug it back down.  In the end, you can guess who won.