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.  

Saturday Photo: And 62 Years Later We're Still Together

This photo was taken at a party my mother insisted we have to celebrate our engagement.  It was part of a trade-off: party at Christmas with all their friends, wedding Aug. 29, 1964 with only close friends and family.  

The engagement party was okay, but the wedding was really great fun--everybody went swimming after the ceremony.  And the time ever since has been great!
 

Saturday Photo: Dog Days in Mile End

Well, according to Wikipedia the Dog Days of Summer run from July 19 to Aug.11, so this beast sitting on a car in Montreal's Mile End neighborhood last weekwas a little past due date.

Neverthless, it stopped many pedestrians who, like me, were taken by the creature who seemed to be sitting without being attached to the roof of the car.  The book in its paws has something to do with dogs: is it a guide to hunting them?

Whatever, the temperatures have started to fall in the evenings around here, while the worst heat seems passed.  We were spared the terrible hot spells other regions have suffered recently, but reasonable folks can't deny that summer is a lot hotter than it used to be.

Maybe the thing to do is to sic the beast shown here on climate deniers... 
 

Saturday Photo: Cosmos, the Star Flower of the Perseids

This week the self-seeding cosmos have begun to bloom.  Of course, there are places which have had them for weeks, but they were all started inside and some, like the ones I bought in June, are beginning to look a little ragged.  But cosmos re-seed themselves, and they're easy to grow from seed in a sunny corner.  They just take their own sweet time to flower.

And now is the time.  They are all over the place here, and looking great.  It's a delightful coincidence that their arrival coincides most years with the August shower of meteorites, the Perseids.  Shooting stars in the heavens, dancing flowers on earth....