Faced with all that sadness in the world, unsure that anyone has a real solution, for now I’ve settled on doing what I can to try not to make things worse. The frost was late this year, but now the season of gorgeous, gold landscapes is coming to a close. I’m cleaning up for winter, but differently from how I used to do it. Cleaning up used to mean cutting down dead flower stalks, clearing out brush, removing leaves, and basically making the yard and garden ready for spring planting. But spring planting is months away, and meanwhile there are plenty of small creatures who need shelter for the winter. The solitary bees native to North America will hibernate in spent stems; non-migratory birds find protection from wind and storms in untrimmed brush; leaf litter is a natural mulch, protecting many overwintering plants. It’s a gardener’s Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.

I did empty the pots on the deck that held zinnias and cosmos, so I could plant bulbs in them. They will look, for months, as though nothing is happening there, but if all goes well they will poke green noses up in March and flowers in April, proof that things happen sometimes when we can’t tell. This is a cheering thought.

It’s chilly to sit out in the woods now, but calm. I learned from my friend Kari to gather some of the beautiful fallen leaves and press them in the pages of old phone books. Come Thanksgiving I will tumble them out to decorate my table. Kari says it’s nice if you forget one of the books, pick it up at random some time later, and find yourself in an unexpected shower of red and gold.

I also admit to cutting down a few spent flowers for arrangements. I brought in dried allium, sedum, and agastache from my garden, for this tableau. They dried themselves with no effort, and no phone books, on my part. I just left them out there till they looked like this, and then brought them in. Sometimes when you try that they get weatherbeaten and windblown. Sometimes you get lucky. I always make sure there are plenty left for the critters in the yard.

As I said, the frost was late this year. Last week it was 72 degrees here, but now there are snow flurries 50 miles to the north, and serious snow in the Upper Peninsula. The dusty miller by my front door, untouched by frost, makes a ghostly companion for some Halloween spirits. Dusty miller is a very tolerant plant, not sensitive to frost, not sensitive to drought, not picky about soil, and not tasty to deer. It’s also not a perennial in Michigan, but it carries our growing season into November with graceful persistence determined by its own nature. Unlike us, it has nothing to decide.