I'm lovin' it--but should I be?

It's November, and the hydrangeas in the park across the street have come into full bloom after September's drought.

 

The bushes in front of a neighbor's house are putting out buds.

 Fall color has been known to hang around into November, but a quick glance up the street indicates that a lot of our deciduous trees are still fully green--not a common phenomenon in my youth.

In the planting beds along the river trail, quite a few plants have rebloomed, including a spectacular echinacea cultivar,

 

and mandevilla is still hanging on. Mandevilla. In November. In Ohio.

This is not normal.

I am the first to confess to loving long, slow autumns. Cold makes my bones hurt, and the cold, damp, dirty air of the Mid-Ohio Valley in winter does unfortunate things to my ability to breathe. 70-degree November afternoons are a lovely thing.

But we are overdue for the first frost, which typically hits our area between October 15-20. Toledo, which generally gets its first frost by October 10, is still frost-free and had roses, heliotrope, and pineapple sage blooming last weekend. A monarch butterfly, which should have been several hundred miles further south by then, was fluttering around. That particular individual is unlikely to get to its winter home in Mexico.

Yes,I am loving all this lingering beauty, but I am not sure that these are good signs for the climate of the rest of the world.