Tom decided that our steak dinner on Thursday was not enough of a birthday celebration, so he spent much of yesterday afternoon planning, shopping, and preparing a gorgeous meal: scallops tossed with his own hand-cut noodles alongside a lemony fennel salad from our garden.

Meanwhile, I spent the afternoon harvesting radishes and carrots, planting garlic, weeding the vegetable garden, deadheading the flowers, and otherwise tidying things up a bit for fall.

Mid-afternoon we decided to go for a walk--our usual crisscross among the neighborhood streets and through the little glen known as Baxter Woods, where I began to spot a few honey mushrooms here and there, and then, suddenly, the motherlode. This photo captures only a few of them--

Immediately I whipped my foraging bag out of my purse (you won't believe how often I've used it this summer!) and we started picking, eventually bringing home this trove. It's hard to gauge sizes from the photo, but that's a my largest colander sitting in a dishpan, and as you can see, it's overflowing with booty. 

So as Tom rolled out noodles, I cleaned and sliced and sautéed honey mushrooms, eventually packing two quart bags with treasure. We now have five quarts of various varieties of wild mushrooms in the freezer--all foraged in my own city neighborhood.

October: what a lovely month! The last tomatoes, on the stove, thickening into sauce. Carrots and radishes, scrubbed, glowing like jewels. Clutches of little peppers still clinging to their handsome plants. Kale and chard and parsley flourishing in the cooling air. Zinnias and dahlias still blooming bravely. Mushrooms sprouting in the forests, and me, almost finished with my Iliad assignment, sitting in my study by an open window gazing down at the shrubs settling into their autumn sleep, the cardinals at the feeder, the squirrels bustling along the fence lines.

Every morning I write down my dreams, and then the day becomes its own dream.