Saturday Photo: Countdown to Halloween

 Still about two weeks to go before Halloween but  a lot of folks have started celebrating.  This stack of lovely pumpkins and gourds is outside a small resto in the neighbourhood.  I wonder how long it will last...

Saturday Photo: Abundance for Thanksgiving Day

This photo of windfall apples spaks to the abundance of fruits and vegetables available to many of us during this harvest season.

Thank goodness!  We are so lucky to have more than enough to eat, to go to sleep in a warm, clean place, and, frequently, to be loved.

So even if you are not a believer, I think it is good to pause occasionally and take stock of all we have.  Gratitude is not a dirty word.
 

Saturday Photo: Resilient Beauty

 Saw these flowers this week.  Growing between paving stones on a busy street can't be easy, but nevertheless they have succeeded.  A lesson for us all when it seems the odds are stacked against us, perhaps.

Saturday Photo: Fall Flames...

 September is the time of change, when the landscape can change overnight to be something quite different from what you'd been enjoying for weeks.  These sumac leaves are a harbinger of what is to come.  The first flames of fall....

Saturday Photo: The Bones of the Earth

 This is what you go through when you take Montreal's REM trains, the Réseau express métropolitain.  Well, you don't magically find yourself transported through solid rock, but you do travel through a tunnel cut through the rock that forms the bones of Mount Royal.

 

The REM designers wisely left a window on the rock at the level before the level of trains in the Edouard Montpetit station.  When I took the train downtown the other day, I was wisked 20 storeys down from the brilliant fall sunshine to the bones of the earth in seconds by one of the elevators.  The experience is a little unsettling if you stop to think about it, but if you're in a hurry, all you can think about is the speed with which you can get one place to another.

 The REM has had/is having problems at various times, but it is an excellent addition to public transport when it runs.  

Saturday Photo: Harvest, Marché Jean Talon

This is a great time of year for anyone who loves fresh food.  The Marché Jean Talon in Montreal's Piccola Italia is full of tomatoes, basil, lettuce, corn, garlic, ontions, not to mention the first apples and pears, nectarines and grapes from Ontario.

I love to go there and I love even more coming back home to eat what I've bought.  Next up today: finding some new recipe for the eggplant I bought.  
 

Saturday Photo: And Another Thing You Shouldn't Mess With--A Wasp Nest

This is the time of year when wasps suddenly appear around here.  It's often hard to eat outside because they come around looking for a snack.  Preparing for winter, it seems.   Usually, though, you can move your picnic a short distance or otherwise outwit them.

But sometimes they decide to set up housekeeping around your house.  What they make is quite wonderful when you think about it: a sort of piñata made of wood pulp that inspired the Chinese a couple of thousand years ago to make paper from wood pulp.

 However, as long as the wasps are actively residing in the nest you don't want to have anything to do with it.  This one was up the street a year or so ago, and the people who lived there got the city to come and take it down.  Didn't see it, but I imagine it was quite an operation. 

 There's a lesson there, too: don't go after something that might be dangerous unless you've got a good end game.  That's advice that some folks in power should heed, I think.