When I was a kid I never understood how anyone could say that Autumn was their favorite time of year. Without hesitation, I’d argue for the virtues of summer and all of its barefoot glory. These days I get it though and if you ask me, I’ll tell you how much I love the moderate days and cool evenings, watching leaves change color and flutter from the trees, and filling my weekends with football and yard work that doesn’t leave me drenched in sweat.

So far this Fall I’ve found two different potential pickup football games to participate in. I played with a group of guys for a couple hours on Wednesday in the park across the street. And this morning Mary and I played with a church group that we bumped into a week ago, also playing in the same park. Later Mary made a huge batch of cabbage rolls (I don’t like cabbage, but after simmering with beef for four hours these things are ridiculously good) which is kind of one of her family’s Fall traditions and we ate these while watching the University of Michigan look like a halfway decent football team in beating Penn State.

Mary and I also teamed up to roll a gigantic boulder in our backyard to a new location this afternoon. We had about a dozen of these rocks scattered throughout our yard in what must have been an enthusiastic “natural” landscaping scheme years ago. I’ve slowly been digging these couple-hundred pound behemoths out and rolling them to the other side of our fence. This last boulder wouldn’t fit through our gate though and I was destroying my back going at it solo. So it now has a new home in the corner of our yard.

I’ve got a wife who plays football, cooks great food, watches football on TV, then slaps on a pair of work gloves to shove a rock around. Awesome.