Signs of Autumn (Post Them Here)

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My long underwear is in the dryer and I'm starting to think that a charge on my credit card for enough outdoor gear to not-die in the forest might be preferable to a charge on my credit card for not-particularly-wanted entertainment products designed to dispose of the surplus lives of surplus couch sitters.

Also, I bought bondo; don't want those rust spots getting worse and everything getting wet when the rains start. Tossed a cute steering wheel cover in the cart while I was at it to admit that my transportation doubles as a shelter and I like my shelters to be comfortable and homey and appeal to my own aesthetics.

Three Pine Siskins down by the river this afternoon.

There are more leaves on the ground than in the trees.

A Ruby-crowned Kinglet in the three-foot-tall bush right beside my front doorstep.

Very good fall this year. Very vibrant leaf colors. Lots of blazing red.

It is Halloween.

Had to get out my cold-weather pants today.

dark, gray gloom. early nightfall. cold. damp.

Talk on the local police radio tonight warning of ice on the roadways.

The days get colder and the nights get longer.

Columbus day, Veteran's day, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Kwanzaa and Xmas having come up or coming up soon.

Colder weather and it's getting darker earlier.

We had four inches of snow over the weekend, and now the Salvation Army bell ringers are out, so that means we're heading into winter. This will close our "Signs of Autumn" thread for the year — we'll see you next September (unless the antipodeans decide to make an appearance in March).

RELUCTANCE

Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Thanksgiving day soon.

Nighthawks in the sky every evening now.

Time for our traditional beginning:

Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Elizabeth Jennings

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this—
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names—
Autumn and summer, winter, spring—
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.