Mockingbird Hill Cottage

More fall color for you, courtesy of our trees:

The silver maple.

It’s raining today, so a lot of these leaves will be on the ground by the end of the day.

I’ll miss them.

•  Do you remember our honeybees?

They lived in our catalpa tree and we co-existed peacefully for years until a couple of years ago, when some aggressive bees infiltrated the community. It became impossible to get within twenty feet or so of the tree without a bee dive-bombing us or the dogs. We sought the help of a beekeeper, but we ended up leaving them alone as it was late fall at the time. It ended up resolving itself as the colony died out during the winter, so we covered all the access holes with screening material.

This year, they reappeared again toward the end of the summer, squeezing in through an opening at the top of the screen. They weren’t aggressive, so we were thrilled they were back. A good sign. But since the first hard freeze, I haven’t seen them. I have to research it, but something tells me that might be normal.

•  Once again, I’ve been waylaid on my way to reading All The Light We Cannot See  by the arrival at my local library of a book I’ve long been waiting for. I’ve been on the waiting list for this for a few months – long before it was officially released on October 20th. In fact, this is the book I saw in Barnes & Noble when I was in Manhattan on Tuesday. I held off buying it because I knew I was in the queue and thought, given the number of copies of the book in our Inter-library loan system and the number of holds, that I just might get it by the end of the week.

Sure enough, I got an email yesterday and practically flew over to the library to pick it up. I’m happily ensconced in the world of Cormoran Strike as written by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling).

•  I have a link you might be interested in. The New York Times  had a great interview with Terry Gross, longtime host of Fresh Air  on NPR. I think she’s the finest interviewer out there. I started listening to her when I was in grad school in Philadelphia in the early eighties and she was still local. She didn’t go national until a few years later.

I’ve always felt like I was in the secret, you know? Even then, I was gobsmacked by her interviewing skills. Here’s the link.

•  One more link for you today and that’s to an Instagram account. Reader Margaret tipped me off about this one, Megillicutti. Melissa has the most incredible collection of McCoy Pottery – easily 3 times the size of mine and I’m in love with all of it, as well as her decorating style, which is right up my alley. She loves vintage, so much so that she sells at flea markets. She has a great sense of what to buy. She lives in the Chicago area.

I spent part of the afternoon yesterday going back through a lot of her posts. They are eye candy of the best kind; real, lived-in, not trendy (thank god) and beautiful. She’s got a lot of followers and it’s easy to understand why.

Happy Sunday.