Survivors

The days are becoming dark and dreary here.  I was cleaning up the plants in front for the coming winter and found the last blooms of summer today, three small flowers from a pot of multicolor verbena that apparently gave life one last shot with the recent (and continuing) rains.  They survived frost and freeze but time is certainly against them now.  The opening lines from a Thomas Moore poem apply, though this isn't a rose....

 'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone....

Two weeks ago there was another survivor, the last fruit from the yellow, pear tomato plant that was in a protected spot.  I picked and ate the tomato before cutting down the rest of the dead plant and tossing it in the neighborhood mulch pile.  It's unripe sibling was sacrificed to the tomato gods because of the hard freeze coming that night.  Now it's on to winter and tomatoes that taste like red and yellow cardboard.  In six weeks the seed catalogs will be arriving and I can start thinking of spring again.