Look how rich and beautiful my backyard arbor looked just one week ago! And today, the leaves are almost all gone. Wind blew them away this week, and there goes the glory of autumn!

A few more shots: The one on left shows more of the tall Swedish Aspens by the arbor, and the one on right is my water birches in front of the house. We had some nice, rich golden colors last week.

I still have some yellow quaking aspens in the backyard, too, and they really are prettier than I remember them in past years. Some nice color appears for a week or less, and then they turn dark brown before the leaves actually fall. But for our other trees, most of the fall leaves have been blown off this week.

We’ve actually had a remarkable week for weather. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had temps over 70 degrees! It was like spring! Then the temp dropped 30 degrees on Thursday, and we’ve had a little rain and a dusting of snow this morning from the night before. I even slid on some black ice on my drive to work. It was pretty scary. Despite the good days this week, we’re now on track for storm after wintery storm as far as the forecasters can see. It’s good though, because our fall has started to get too dry. It was pretty wet in September, but now we need more precipitation to have a healthy water year.