I am so looking forward to Thanksgiving. Jim will be coming home from Dallas. Mike will be here from South Bend with his new girlfriend. Anne and Zach will probably not make it unless they find a last minute deep discount fare. :-( But they will be home for Christmas so we can look forward to that!

It's starting to get cold. Only a few things left still alive in my garden. I called my friend Sally (who was a horticulture major in college) to ask if we really need to clean out flower beds for the winter. Want to know the truth? I never do it. I let everything die and in the Spring start over again. But it seems a lot of people do clear their beds. Sally says it doesn't matter for the flowers. In fact clearing them out can prevent delightful reseeding surprises in the Spring...which I have experienced. I nearly always have a volunteer tomato plant from the year before. And then there are those snapdragons. I haven't planted a snapdragon in several years and yet each year one or two pop up in the garden. So sweet.

So. Maybe my yard doesn't look so great right now. But Sally thinks it'll be OK. And that's been my experience. In fact, maybe there's a small advantage in that all those dead plants become compost?

Or maybe I'm just good at rationalizing my preference for curling up with a good book....