September in Celo

We are spending the month of September up on the family farm. It has been really really wonderful. Now that my mom has finished building a second home (right next to my in-laws farm), it has been nice to have our own space when we come up for this long. Especially because Gabe is using this time to study and I am working on my business it is also nice not to have the usual distractions of 20 goats, 2 sheep, 2 lamas, 3 rabbits, 5 dogs, many chickens, the list goes on.

It is also a really nostalgic time of year to be up here. The final days of summer where the line between summer and fall blurs into a perfection of temperature, color, burstingly ripe tomatoes, and the last several jumps in the river for the year. We say prayers of thanks for every warm day that we can still sit out on a big rock in the sun or for bare feet because we know it won't last much longer. Although the surrounding foliage is still a bright blanket of green, the shade seems to have shifted slightly and lonely bright red leaves that seem to appear out of nowhere float past as we dip in the river. Fall, my favorite.

We have been in a really bad drought here in western North Carolina and the river has been soooo very low. But a couple of weeks ago a huge storm brought something like 8 inches of rain in less than 48 hours and the river rose several feet. A few days later Gabe and his dad decided to tube the river in it's unusually swift currents. The pictures below are right after their climb back up the hill from the river after their float. I thought they looked so cute. Usually we never tube with wetsuits or helmets but this was precautionary after the flooding.