Summer is winding down and the pressure of things to do eases. The children are back in the school routine and parents are back at jobs that took time off for the holiday weekend. It is like someone pushed a time button as colorful pots of “mums” appear at roadside stands, garden shops, and in many gardens. They are something to look forward to as September and October set the stage for autumn.

Flower gardens that didn’t do very well all summer make a last show of bloom. My daughter Susan is happy to be getting a final show of blooms on her roses. One is a climber which is giving a second display of blooms. Poems and songs have been written about “The last rose of summer.”

Wendy’s son Ben has “settled in” at Quinnipiac University. He hasn’t had many complaints and is pretty knowledgeable about things like laundry and room-keeping. Wendy has found herself in charge of the indoor fish tank and also the little outdoor pool Ben constructed last summer. All his fish survived the winter and most of them have also lived through the summer, except for the two which the family cat managed to pull out of the pool. The cat hasn’t been too popular since.

I am missing trips to Vermont this time of year. I have a few places where I could find bittersweet, some late bearing elderberries, and all kinds of dried things. Before my cousin Barbara Vizvarie moved from the Shelburne Mountain Webb estate where her husband and son worked, I was always happy to ride through a stand of horse chestnut trees which grew on each side of a lane. In ten minutes, it was possible to pick up a large shopping bag full. Their burrs, when dried, are cinnamon brown, and the chestnuts and a few pieces of driftwood along the edge of nearby Lake Champlain were part of decorations made later for Christmas projects.

Our next door neighbor in Vermont had not only a blueberry patch, but about now we used to get a few cranberries in his backfield. I never found any good grapes in the wild, in Vermont, but I knew where I could buy some on the way home.

The other neighbors down the road made a great totem pole of pumpkins in the fall. Each pumpkin had a different personality and I took a picture, as we went down the road. A family down near the village solved the problem of Halloweeners stealing their pumpkins, by mounting them in a row across the front of an upstairs roof.

Any day now I expect Ed Coffey to deliver some fresh catnip from the field at the home of Brian and Nancy Zorena. They cut large stalks of it and pack it in large trash bags where it dries in a short time. I make packages of it for The Historic Society Christmas Fair. This is so much more fragrant than the kind you can buy in the store. When Moxie was still here with me, he knew I kept some in the top drawer of an antique chest. He would jump up on top of a nearby chair back, when he heard me open the drawer.

This is the time for the annual fairs of various agricultural groups. The Bethlehem Fair is this weekend, and in late September or early October is the Harwinton Fair – a favorite of mine. It has kept its old fashioned flavor, while providing all kinds of exhibits.

The column closed last week with the first lines of the well known poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.

Who wrote – “My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean’s edge as I can go”?