In spring we crawl out of our cocoons and celebrate bursting rejuvenation; in summer we play outside from dawn to dusk; during the dark, frigid winter we hunker down like hibernating bears – which leaves fall, when we try to set aside time for fun activities but wind up spending dwindling daylight toiling on long neglected outdoor projects and chores.

In the past few weeks I’ve rebuilt and extended stone walls, cut firewood, pruned trees, cleared brush, hacked away invasive vines and filled in ruts on trails around our house – tasks you can’t do when the ground is too wet or frozen, or when it’s too blasted hot and you’d rather be swimming, kayaking or hiking in the mountains.

As we now approach late autumn I’m still raking leaves, which is ridiculously late. In past years the trees were mostly bare and I’d have the driveway, paths and stairs cleared by Halloween. Thanks to climate change some of the oaks are still green and leaves continue to cling to the beeches, so I’ll probably still be raking my network of trails into December.

Loyal readers will recall my victorious Man vs. Leafblower contest that I wrote about a few years ago and demonstrated on video, http://www.theday.com/article/20131115/MEDIA0102/131119764/0/search so I won’t dwell on the virtues of raking except to say that I think I’ve converted a few neighbors to the human-powered cause. With my encouragement they also bag their leaves or stuff them in barrels and drop them off at our house to be used for mulch; I return the empty containers. It’s a great system.

The garden is still producing Swiss chard, and a few green tomatoes somehow escaped destruction during frosty nights. A dozen or so onions also remain in the ground; I’d better dig them up soon.

The other day while planting more than 200 garlic cloves I made a happy discovery: A number of seed pods that fell from the scapes last summer had germinated and produced new bulbs – garlic volunteers!

I brought some in for use in a savory stir-fry; the rest I left in the ground for next summer’s harvest. The hardy plants, a harbinger of spring when their shoots pop up through snow, require almost no maintenance if you take the time, as I do, to sow, fertilize and mulch in the fall.

First I use a mattock to dig furrows about a foot apart, then I stick cloves pointy-side-up an inch or so deep every 6 inches, cover the furrows with composted manure – that’s the hard part, dragging a couple hundred pounds of natural fertilizer up a long hill to the garden – and finally cover the whole bed with crushed leaves.

I never had to water or weed my garlic at all last summer, and yielded a bumper crop that I shared with friends and family.

Truth be told I may call these fall tasks “work” but they’re fun, satisfying and mentally therapeutic. The other day I brought my pry bars, mattock, shovel and steel-framed cart to the home of some friends and helped them build a stone bench using large boulders salvaged from a nearby wall.

The few hours of labor proved the perfect antidote to our post-election malaise/despair.

Fall hasn’t been all work, though. Earlier this week I took the kayak out and thrilled to view a bald eagle soar just overhead.

Within the next month or so, I hope, we’ll be cross-country skiing and ice-skating.

Before you know it, it’ll be time to tap the maple trees and make syrup.

In the mean time, though, I’ve got to extricate one more ottoman-size rock jutting into a trail that always trips me when I’m lugging logs to the woodshed. It’ll be fun, I tell myself.