Feeling Autumn

 

 

     Autumn is here.  I can smell it in the air – the damp earth, and the foggy mornings.  I hear it when the crickets and katydids are singing for all they’re worth because they know cold is on its way. I taste it in the tart crabapples my girls convince me to try.  I feel it in that sharp underneath chill that’s in the air even when the sun is warm.  I see it in the trees even though they haven’t truly turned yet.  There’s just a hint of color and the green of summer is fading.  The massive old Black Walnut trees are looking bare in the backyard.  They are the last of the trees to grow their leaves in the spring and the first to lose them in the fall.  

     It’s beautiful, this season, Autumn.

 

 

 

 

A Vagabond Song        Bliss Carman (1861– 1929)

 

 

THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry. Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

 

 

 

October's Bright Blue Weather

     Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

 

   

He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings;

he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding;

Daniel 2:21