It’s getting bare, here. The wind and the rain have descended, and the leaves are piling up on the ground. There’s a sort of wine-dark rot smell to the autumn now, something that will only be replaced with the sharp smell of cold and the iron-smelter stink of impending snow. The sap’s earthing itself. I’m earthed with it, waiting for the frost.

A pair of crows comes by every day, calling loudly back and forth as they sit in my ash tree. Soon the neighbourhood will be quiet, the birds gone to warmer roosts. Meanwhile my yard fills with dusky doves and rotund squirrels, taking advantage of the birdseed I scatter across the lawn.

No real plan for the stones here - just picked through my collection as I wanted, and wound up with this: Smokey quartz pillar, jet, black obsidian, snowflake obsidian, apache’s tears, onyx, black moss agate, tiger’s eye, copper.