Mushrooms and Maple Leaves

The falling maple leaves in my sister's front yard can't quite camouflage the small mushroom crop, which I spotted for the first time on October 15.

Dogwood in October

Rising from the shoulder of the road in front of my sister's house, a little dogwood tree is once more showing its bright red berries, as it has been doing for several decades now. The past summer has been very hard on it, weeks and weeks of drought punctuated by windy thunderstorms. The toll from this is evident in its leaves and in the relative scarcity of the berries this fall. Yet it remains brilliant in the sun.