Art happens all the time. On a sunny November day, turning mimosa leaves scream art as they sway in a gentle breeze.

On the way home from a run to the post office, I was stopped by a mile long, mobile art installation. At the bottom of Bow Hill is a ribbon of steel stretching from Vancouver, BC, all the way to Seattle and to cities far beyond. Hour by hour, art installations lumber by.

There is so much art to see every day, I’m surprised Burlington Northern Railroad hasn’t installed viewing stands next to the rail crossings. They could be outdoor art museums. Do you need to take a break from the day’s frustrations? Stop, and enjoy the art pieces that roll by every so often.

The variety of art pieces slipping by is impressive. They slip by too quickly to see who the artist is. Did an artist in Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, or Los Angeles create this Octopus? The railcar carrying the Octopus was a TTX railcar, a Pennsylvania company which sends railcars all over Canada, the USA, and Mexico. The Octopus may have been painted in Veracruz! By the time the installations stop, how many people will enjoy the pieces, how many cities will the installations roll through?

At home, old Billy looks majestic on this sunny autumn day. He’s 7 ½ years old now.

The waning sun casts October skies with their own shade of blue. I suppose if I spent all my time outdoors, I could tell what week of the year it was just by the hue of the sky or the angle of the tree shadows. It’s said that many animals are sensitive to the length of daylight. For example, hens supposedly need fourteen hours of daylight to lay eggs. But maybe, it’s not the length of day but the color of the sky that they respond to.

We had another frosty morning. With each day, winter steps closer.

Takuma 拓真 and Ena 枝那 are helping me bring in as many beans as possible before the big storms arrive tonight and tomorrow. They can’t figure out why I’m bothering picking the bean pods. They both take one and chew on it, but they are not impressed.

This afternoon we stopped at an old church on a hill above Silvana about thirty miles south of us. It’s a lovely little church and we’ve visited it several times before.

The church is surrounded by graves, and we saw this one of a Lars and Randi Larson. Behind their gravestone were the graves of four infant children who all died between the ages of one and three. It took my breath away. It was only a little over a hundred years ago, and yet the graves speak of a harsh life I can’t fathom. From Snohomish County Biographies Abstracts, I learned that both Lars Larson and Randi Rorstad were from Norway and were dairy farmers. They had some children live, and evidently their ranch ended up being one of the few farms in the state which was managed entirely by women. I’m guessing that once Lars passed away, Randi and her daughters kept the dairy farm going.

Dying at just 44 years, Lars Larson never saw his living children grow up. What was it like for Randi, to bury her young husband and one infant after another? I’m not sure who the father was of the children that came after Lars died. Did she wonder why she left Norway? A hundred years from now when people look back on how we live, they’ll probably say the same thing, and wonder how we survived living under such harsh conditions.