Joe is home!! I'm very happy, despite the fact that he seems to have brought my allergies back with him. Fall is one of my favorite, and most miserable, seasons. I guess that's the whole yin-yang of it.

As the first of the autumn leaves start to turn their brilliant colors, I am officially declaring an end to canning season. As soon as Joe returned we made one last push for apples, picking six 5 gallon buckets of red delicious apples from a friend's trees. Two days later and 9 o'clock at night, by the light of the headlamp, we are pulling the last jars of applesauce out of the canner. What a bountiful summer it has been.

Lily is enjoying all this outdoor canning. While we were busily working around the fire trying to finish up before the light disappeared, she contentedly parked herself right in front of the make-shift stove and gazed into the coals. That is one fire lovin' dog. (P.S. Since the initial writing of this post, Lily pilfered and ate two whole freshly cooked loaves of friendship bread and is now up for sale.)

While Lily is winding down and enjoying the finer things in life, Wilson has appointed himself the county sheriff and seems to be constantly marching off into the woods to set something, or someone, straight. Early the other morning, we were lying in bed watching a pair of deer grazing in the field opposite the house. Wilson and Lily were sleeping on the front porch. Soon, Wilson noticed the deer and immediately went to chase them off, barking ferociously. Only one of the deer found Wilson's display to be at all unsettling and turned to run, with Wilson in hot pursuit. The other deer, a large buck, stood his ground unperturbed. Wilson only chased the deer a short bit before deciding he had made his point and turned back toward the house with a jaunty air about him. He strutted right past the buck, stopping no more than twenty feet from where he stood. With his back to the buck, he gave a satisfied yawn and a deep stretch and prepared to resume his sleep in a sunny patch of dirt. The buck looked from Wilson to the top of the hill, where his companion had eventually stopped after realizing he was the only one running. Several minutes elapsed before something alerted Wilson (maybe it was that feeling you get when someone is staring at you) and he whipped around to finish the job. I half worried that Wilson might be impaled on the buck's antlers, but both deer decided it wasn't worth the effort to argue and just took the easy road out. Lily sat on the porch quietly observing the whole event. Joe and I almost died from laughter. Wilson did his best to hide his surprise and make like he had known that buck was there all the while.