"Summer's over; winter drawers on"

That's an old pun, best heard from a person with a strong New England accent. Summer is truly over, no matter what the official calendar says. It may say that fall is here, but that's not necessarily so. It is true, though, that we are enjoying the last of our oxblood lilies. We have seen anemone leaves coming up through the grass. It didn't require much wind to do some serious damage to a mature redbud tree. Loppers cleared a passage along the sidewalk and the walk from the street to the front porch, but, for safety reasons, we called in the fine people at Just Trees, known to us from the time that they felled a leaning pecan tree that posed a serious danger to several buildings and was very close to utility lines. And all of a sudden the last of our working locks started being balky about releasing keys and nobody wants to go off and leave a key in a lock. The Sharp's Locksmith expert told us that the heat and various types of shifting caused by this summer's dryness have caused a lot of trouble for people. We're so lucky to have a neighborhood locksmith who understands the peculiarities of older establishments.