In the spring, I moved my remaining hollyhocks into the fenced vegetable garden to save these flowers from feasting groundhogs. Spring, summer churned along. Now autumn, my garden still blooms its rainbow. Gathering tomatoes and basil for dinner, scraps of birch bark and kindling to start a fire, I pause for a moment in the drizzle, soaking in the delicate petals, the mist brushing in for the night, the trees already doing each their own foliage thing — some gold and orange, some already shaken down to bare twigs, others green, green, as if in defiance of winter.

Across the valley, the coyotes call, once, twice, as if testing their voices.

I snip bunchy orange marigolds for my table, their centers spicy. Overhead, the geese are always winging away these days, gathering their Vs, heading for their winter quarters, elsewhere. The clustered sunflowers, in their different heights and states of disarray from gold petal to curled brown leaf, rustle with the fat little chickadees dipping in and out, scavenging. Oh, sunflowers, so easily grown: scattered seeds, my palms pressing soil, water and sunlight. For me and the birds I imagine I sow these beauties, but of course that’s not true at all. The sunflowers are the waving prayer flags of my garden, this small territory.

The neighbor boys pile their sweatshirts and run in their t-shirts, the smallest hustling in and out of the lilac bushes, hide-and-seek. Rain pitters on leaves. A T.S. Eliot line runs through my memory, that graceful dismal poet, “…music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all…”

A few snippets of autumn.