Intimations of Autumn

Upon awakening, I reach for the lightweight down coverlet and pull it up around my shoulders.  The morning is crisp and fresh.  Light slants through the blinds at an end-of-summer angle,  beckoning me out of bed.  I pull on a sweatshirt, knowing that time has come.

On my walk, I find a smattering of orange leaves floating serenely on the pond.  Overhead, leaves on lower branches are tinged.  Across the water, the vibrant green of summer has begun to mellow.  The cattail grasses are drying to straw.

Last night around mid-night I stepped outside to check the northern skies.  There had been reports of northern lights and I was on the look-out for the waving luminous curtains I'd seen online.  It was a rare clear night with clusters of stars usually not visible amidst the more familiar summer constellations. By then the big dipper had set. Craning my neck in awe, I inhaled the late summer sky, breathing it into my being.  At the same time I felt it inhaling me.

In another late summer ritual, I emptied our front porch urns of their leggy petunias and scrappy salvia, replacing them with farm stand finds.  Ornamental millet looks like a glossy brown corn stalk, with fronds waving on top.  It's halloween-ish!  I surround these with a spiraling heads of silvery- green kale, yellow, orange and red ornamental peppers and  tiny purple mums.

 

I've been sitting outside at in the evenings after dinner, reading and soaking up the last light of the ever-shortening days.  The air is dusky.  One knows that the earth and sun are shifting in relation to each other as one season comes to a close and another dawns.

I notice myself not mourning the passing of summer.

This new season of harvest promises riches of its own.