Dog Walk.

First of the new morning dog walks: Hat-cold. The cannas are going purple-black, the oaks on Fernwood are just starting to turn, and the acorns are getting crushed into a flour over on Timber. Acorns under tires or heels is I think a pretty good sound. The neighborhood gets a little ugly in the winter, but I don't mind. There's something interesting about the spareness, the sparseness, all these plain box ranches huddled down onto the browning lawns. The neighborhood feels more its age then, somehow. We're not there yet, but it's coming.

Something I love about Greensboro: The leaf trucks, the guys walking behind the leaf trucks with the gaping vacuum hose, the piles of leaves that hunch up on the curbs from now until the first of the year. I'm sure most everybody else in every other town has leaf trucks, too, but we didn't in Atlanta, and so it's still a novelty to me, even after ten years, still another new kind of big yellow work truck coming down the street making a shit-ton of noise. And the dog likes nothing better than to wade chest-deep into pile after pile after pile of dogwood and pin oak.

This afternoon, then: maybe some raking. The Chinese Firs are starting to cover over the lawn. They throw off great huge chunks of their —leaves? needles? twigs? branches? — for about the next four months. Kind of a pain in the ass, but a good excuse to drag down my grandfather's giant rake and try suburban life on for size one more time.