Most of my day was spent getting my house and yard ready for winter. I really don’t mind the raking and mulching of leaves as well putting the garden furniture into the shed, but I also had to do this most disgusting of chores, cleaning the gutters. I have a slightly slanted roof that is covered with small gravel. Add a couple of big oak trees and my gutters were completely filled with an organically-rich mixture of gravel and humus. My own lazyness was apparent for all to see in the form of growing weeds, a suburban version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Home maintenance doesn’t get any more unpleasant (and dangerous) than that. What was even more amazing was the presence of earthworms in the humus. I don’t need my Ph.D. in biology to know that earthworms can’t fly and they can’t climb trees. So how on earth did they get up there? Maybe they were picked up by a Robin who dropped them when it was startled by a squirrel. Alternatively, a baby earthworm might have hitched a ride on a small piece of dirt that was temporarily trapped under a racoon’s paw. The mystery remains.

At the end, nature had one more surprise in store for me. I climbed up with a garden hose so that I could wash off the rest of the dirt. That’s when I noticed that part of my roof gravel was covered with these adorable bulbs of moss, our very own green roof.