We’ve been having my favorite kind of weather this week, cool and gray, not quite raining, just a bit misty. The autumn leaves do look glorious on a sunny day, but I love the way the golden trees almost work as a substitute sun on cloudy days, serving as a bright pop of color. I really enjoy my morning walks on these days, and then coming home and having a hot cup of tea.

Though this morning, I dressed a little too warmly for the walk once I got going, and I came home hot and just wanted cold water. I need to remember to expect to be a bit cold at first, and then I’ll warm up quickly.

I may be on the verge of becoming a bird watcher. There’s a network of waterways through my neighborhood, and we have a community of ducks that lives here year-round, but at this time of year, we also get the migrating birds. There’s one kind that I’m trying to figure out. They’re sort of duck-like, but very different from the mallards who live here. They look a bit like loons, but I haven’t heard any of the loon sounds. I’ve been hearing geese, but haven’t seen any of them. Then there are the egrets and herons. Watching all of these birds is fascinating. The other day, they seemed to either think that some leaves in the water were fish or they were playing a game because they were taking turns swooping out onto the water, picking up a leaf, and taking it to shore, where they’d throw it at another bird.

I also like trying to identify trees by their leaves. When I was in fifth grade, we had to do a science project in which we collected as many varieties of leaves as we could find, pressed them in wax paper, and tried to identify them. On the plus side, we lived on the edge of a great forest with walking paths through it, so it was incredibly easy to get leaves. The challenge was that we were in Germany, and the reference books in the school library were American, so the species didn’t quite line up (and this was long before the Internet). I can still identify a lot of trees, but the purely American ones are harder for me.

The squirrels are also fun at this time of year as they run around with their mouths full of acorns. Normally, they don’t seem to mind people, but now they hide from everyone, probably thinking we’re going to steal their stash.

Help! I’m starting to sound like a food blog. This is where I’d finally start talking about the recipe and how I like to eat it when I come home from one of these walks. We’d have a few more paragraphs about the recipe and what I like about it, then lots of pictures of it, then finally the recipe. I should have taken pictures of all these things I was talking about, but I’m usually so busy looking at it all that I don’t think to stop and take pictures, and since I’m walking for fitness, I don’t think about stopping at all. I just take pictures with my eyes and mind so I can remember it.