Welcome to Autumn

It's great to open the window and find that the outside air feels better in every way than the inside air. The breeze just wafted a winged ash seed through the third story window and landed it on the keyboard. Hard mast!

It's also a time of year when Florida residents tend to think about hurricanes and other vagaries of nature. An elderly neighbor once recollected to me what she'd been told, as a young girl, about the jobs held by two of the leaders of her clan: "Your father is a businessman. He goes downtown every day and outsmarts other businessmen. But your uncle is the (Tennessee) Commissioner of Agriculture. He deals with God Almighty, and nobody outsmarts Him." Forest Stewardship is a bit like being that Commissioner of Agriculture. You think and plan, make land management decisions, and have them carried out, but you'll often be reminded that success or failure depends at least as much on the universe's awesome forces of creation and destruction as on anything you can control. We're thankful that Florida's forest landowners have almost made it through a long and busy hurricane season without overly harsh "reminders". But, with extremely high rainfall in south Florida, some farmers and ranchers--and deer and other Everglades wildlife--have not been so fortunate.