While raking a mountain of pine needles from the upper yard, we stumbled onto what looked like a swarm of giant wasps emerging from a tree trunk. A little digging revealed they weren’t wasps at all, but Pigeon Tremex Horntails—nature’s recyclers, turning a dying tree into the next layer of forest life. What started as a weekend cleanup became a reminder that even decay has its purpose.

Fall has arrived hard at Grandview, and with it comes the scramble to button things up before snow arrives. What started as a little peeling paint on the sunroom turned into an excavation of rot—scraping, cutting, and patching until solid wood showed itself again. Inside, a slow drip on the water heater line reminded me that copper, too, has its limits.

Both projects tell the same story: wood wants to return to earth, metal wants to corrode, and water wants in. The only thing standing in the way is steady attention; scraping, sealing, soldering, repeating.

As fall arrives all at once, the rhythm of life at Grandview changes too. The frantic speed-run that was our summer is slowing, our progress is compounding, and we are shifting to preparation for the cold ahead.

One-third of Grandview is freshly painted; trim, muntins, and a small city’s worth of patched plaster. I sealed up old-house smells, made peace with window grids, and - shocking no one more than myself - fell for ECOS paint.

This project has been perhaps the biggest victim of our summer’s “alternative plans”. Not only is it non-mission-critical, we also don’t play tennis and can’t see the court from the house, so when we needed to tighten our summer scope this was the first and fastest to get the axe.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve been standing in that aisle feeling like an idiot, or digging around in a basement looking for a shutoff, and though “man I wish this was written down.'“

I showed up at Grandview this summer with big dreams, and a big ego. Grandview was ready for me though. And boy did she put me in my place.