No photos yet, but I'll blabber a bit before going home to upload them properly...

My sister commented several times that it felt like Fall up here, and I guess it is. The first of the trees are starting to turn yellow, there are a few leaves drifting around on the porch, the sandhill cranes are starting to do their practice migrations flying around town again, and isolated patches of wispy fog hang in the cool morning air. I pulled out a merino wool shirt liner to wear this morning for my run, and the girls were raring to go, showing none of their summer lethargy.

I visited the dogs' former mom at the farmer's market today and we chatted a bit about my sister's visit and the adventures that we had taken her former dogs on. I had taken my sister to visit her farm over the weekend. She had had a pair of newborn goats (behbeh goats! !! !!! photos to come!! !!!!!). The day was perfectly beautiful and warm and sunny (as every day was, when my sister was here, that girl who apparently charms the weather), and as we enjoyed the goats and laughed at the pigs' antics, her human children came running up with the neighborhood kids, shirtless and smeared with red juices from ripe berries. They informed us that they had been attacked by a bear, and showed us the berry juice "blood" on their arms and faces (I wonder if they realized they were making a beary pun! Haha!). We all recoiled in mock horror. Bears! Attacking the children! Their mother scrubbed them with the garden hose as they shrieked at the cold water.

It was all so incredibly charming. It seems almost anachronistic, doesn't it? Children playing with berries in the sunshine, getting lovingly scolded and rinsed by a garden hose. Aren't children supposed to slouch and look surly, hang their oversized pants down low on their hips, and wear baseball caps backwards? I'm telling you, the hope for America may well be in family farms. I hope with a very deep part of me that they never go away.