Autumn

“These autumn days will shorten and grow cold.  The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall.  Christmas will come, then the snows of winter.  You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world… Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond.  The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will wake, the warm wind will blow again….. this lovely world, these precious days….”

~E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Fall is such a unique time here in the Southeast.  In the last roses and first fires, it’s like Summer and Winter hold hands for a little while.

It is a glorious season, lovely in it’s own time.  I relish the wind especially, and the leaves flying and swirling.  It is the quickest season, it seems.  It’s a preparation, a strong beauty-memory to get us through the long winter, the feast before the battle.

You can read so many flowery things about it.  Autumn is a second spring, they say, when every leaf is a flower.  That’s very prettily said, I think, but not how I feel at all.

To me autumn is a man of war, armed and brave.  He comes, rallying creation for the last battle, the prophesied defeat, bleeding red and gold.

“Well, if we are to die”, he says, “let us die like men.”

And that, my friends, is Autumn.

It’s also why I couldn’t write for Hallmark.  : D