Smoke on the border.

Coldest day of the autumn so far I'd say, my little hands were the colour of raw beef when I parked up my bike at work. I took some photos of the Asters which are everywhere here. One variety in particular, namely 'Little Carlow' which has been split from a single plant year on year for the past six or seven years. We describe it's effect as being like smoke. One 'Indian Summer' gone by I took some shots into the low sun of my work mate mowing the lawn with a 2-stroke workhorse, a plume of engine smoke filtered the suns rays as it drifted out over a bed of salvias and 'Little Carlow'. The polaroid result was that of smoke and aster becoming one, forming a low rolling deep purple fog. One of many other things that I love about this time of year is the sweet smell of fruit decaying on the ground, we pick up barrow loads of wind fall apples and many pears, but strangely not this year. Apples we have, but no pears. Maybe it was a late frost or strong winds that took the blossom,who knows?, but I'm not missing the wasps. The conversation in the bothy somehow got on to an old kids game/toy called 'Operation' which if you remember was a plastic guy with a red nose who lay flat out with his internal organs on display. The object of the game being that you used some tweezers attached to a wire to remove the organs one by one, if the tweezers made contact to the sides a buzzer would sound and his nose would flash. Anyway, this led on to my boss telling a story about a pathologist friend of hers who received a strange gift. Someone had gone to the trouble of making a corpse doll out of felt and sown into it were the internal organs, a lovely little extra touch was the little toe tag that came with it.