Astronomically, today is the last full day of summer with cool nights and brisk mornings already upon us. It is the start of my favorite time of year, and I am looking forward to fall color. On the subject of color, I found these flowers in our front yard, just screaming for attention and was happy to oblige them with a photo.

On an unrelated note, I came across the graphic below, which shows the distribution of street orientations relative to compass headings across various cities. Of this group, only Charlotte has a less chaotic street orientation than Boston. For years, I believed the myth that the layout of Boston streets could be traced to early cow paths that later became horse paths and then carriage paths and so on. Recently, I learned that Boston’s street tangle actually traces back to the first settlers claiming where they wanted to live and treating street planning as an afterthought, hilly topography, and the merging of old towns. Personally, I think the cow path theory paints a more vivid picture.