Another cool morning . . . I think they will all be cool from now on. But we haven't yet needed to turn on the furnace, and the bedroom window still stays open all night. And last night I didn't even start a fire in the wood stove: the day had been so sunny that the house stayed warm well into the evening. Plus, I was baking bread, roasting green tomatoes, roasting eggplant, making red beans and rice, so there was a lot of ambient coziness.

Slowly I am whittling away the summer garden. Yesterday I tore out the peppers and the basil and harvested what will probably be the last eggplants and cucumbers, though I'll leave those plants up for a few more days and see what happens. I've got a few more pickings of beans, but by next weekend they'll likely be done. The groundhog has decimated my fall crops--kale, chard, lettuce, cilantro, and parsley are alive but terrible, and the bitten-up fennel is weedy and tough. But I've still got handsome leeks and green onions, a second sowing of carrots to harvest, and a good-looking batch of arugula in the cold frame. And the marigolds, my favorite garnish flower, are blooming bravely. Things could be worse.

It wasn't a great harvest year, thanks to drought and that greedy woodchuck and my father's illness, but in the freezer I've got red tomato sauce, green tomato sauce, green beans, peas, corn (from the farmers' market), blueberries (picked up north), peppers, kale, and pesto. I've got freshly dried cooking herbs--dill, thyme, tarragon, sage, oregano. I've got flowers and grasses drying for winter vases. That's not a bad haul for a teeny-tiny city garden.

Yesterday, before dinner, I sat outside breaking up kindling while Tom finished cutting notches into the boards he'll be siding with today. The boards are cedar, and cedar is ideal fire-starter, so we are saving every sawed scrap for the stove. As I filled bucket after bucket with slips of wood, I thought again about how many years we've been at this: the two of us, squirreling away in tandem, hustling against winter.