The Fall To-Do List

Plant bulbs and hope you’ll see spring.
Watch celestial showers – Draconids, Orionids, Taurids, Leonids.
Observe wildlife change habits as the trees
change colors. Practice being an evergreen.
Feel the equinox and balance straight up.

Photo by Artem Saranin on Pexels.com

I do make many (too many) lists of things to do. I have written about this addiction. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it hurts. I even have seasonal lists of things I need to do in the garden or around the house. A season changes and I change the filters in my furnace and air-conditioning system. Frost comes and I dig up the dead and dying annuals, rake leaves, and add them to the compost.

A group emailed me a list of things to do in autumn. It has lots of the usual things: leaf peeping, apple picking, making and eating fall comfort foods, carving pumpkins, and jumping in leaf piles. But some things on my fall list don’t appear there.

How the Earth’s tilt creates the seasons

Goose Summer

These mild, like summer, autumn days float 
with gossamer clouds and filmy spider webs 
moving slightly in the breeze and geese 
wedging to the lake overhead as I 
take off my goose-down vest and rest. 

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“Goose Summer” is a Middle English term for this kind of late summer weather. See my etymological explanation at whynameitthat.blogspot.com/…indian-summer-gossamer-and-goose-summer

 

From the November window at my desk

I saw the maple flames last week.

Rain and wind and this square canvas

has returned to a simple line drawing.

A new beginning, a few remaining leaves

suggesting what the creator has in mind.

 

An Autumn Dance of Death

Female worker bees are working long hours

gathering autumn nectar for the colony’s winter.

Like me, they’re storing carbohydrates and protein

for when they stay inside, although unlike

bees, I hope not to die there.

Eulogy

Autumn’s not colored foliage or apple picking.

For some, a harvesting or hunting Moon.

Acorns falling like a broken clock tick-tocking.

“Eulogy” in Greek means a “good word,”

quietly spoken for things and people gone.

 

 

Termination Dust

Photo of Denali by Tim Rains, National Park Service.

 

And suddenly, summer green becomes autumn orange.

Termination dust, that Alaskan high altitude snow

signals summer’s end. But not here. Now.

No mountaintops. Just lawns and fallen leaves.

No blueberries for bear’s dessert before hibernation.