Freshfall

Barley, a dog, tromps about in some freshly fallen leaves on a sunny day.

November gave us a mix of sunny and rainy days, with few long stretches of sun (and then, always at a low angle in the sky). For a while there, piles of leaves, once rain-soaked, were not really getting fully dry again. As such, you could only count on finding piles of of crispety, crunchety freshly fallen leaves on day 2 or 3 of a sunny spell. Fresh leaves have the fewest opportunities to gain fruitful treasures that Barley might want to snarf down, so I’m happy to let her root around. Once patches of leaves had made their transition to damp, slippery carpets, I needed to be more vigilant of her exploratory sniffing, ready to intervene if she discovered something questionable. Now, however, temperatures have become sharply colder and the weather drier, and the longer stretches of cold, sunny days make it a lot harder to tell which leafpiles are new and which have merely been moved around by area leafblowers.