I'm just back from five days off, and much of it was spent cleaning up.

I had never done a final mowing of our own lawn, and for a good part of the lawn that required a bit of raking first. Nancy did the preliminary raking while I did the mowing and loading onto the truck. Nancy also took some photos to commemorate the work.

Here is a load of leaves on Veterans Day, when the dump was closed.

This may count as our one mowing and raking this year, because most of the leaves seem to be down. One exception is the Japanese maple, which still looks good. And the neighbor's maple with yellow leaves is hanging onto a few in the background.

We probably will do a spruce up before snow. I will have to rake at Nancy's mother's. I mowed there, picking up two truckloads of leaves, Nov. 1, and the lawn is again covered with leaves. If it isn't raining this coming weekend, we will probably end up going there again.

We did have some good views of garden plants as we raked. The Miscanthus strictus in the backyard looked really good for the second year in a row.

The garden season is about over, and I detail my successes and failures in last Sunday's column.

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