TO AUTUMN

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing dear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

-Robert Frost

We are pretty much postage-stamp size too, and there are lots of things that don't seem to like growing in the vegetable corner (like radishes and green onions -- why?), but boy the tomatoes and the rhubarb are real happy in our dirt. I had the rhubarb all harvested at one point, I thought -- but it's back! it's back! I have to do it all again! Now that's supposed to be a late spring food.

In my memory, this thread had stopped at that point, but I see I was wrong, and we managed to do both poetry and jokes soon after.

---excerpt from "Blue Collar" by BTO.

Last night just before 4:00 AM eastern, I was outside and caught the moon rise. It was a sliver of a crescent, the shape I call "fingernail clipping of the gods". It looked huge there, just above the horizon, with earthshine bouncing back at me, partially illuminating the rest of the lunar disc.

It looked like a black opague marble set in a silver dish, on a black velvet background.

Tonight, there will be no moon. And the sky will be black, the stars will be like diamonds, and the air is fresh.

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Peanut butter cookies in my kitchen, made with the help(hindrance?) of the wee girls... A togetherness project.

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Hey, did you do that too, Zoot? Just yesterday morning I made chocolate chip cookies with my little one.

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Yup. Even let Ms T have a crack at squooshing them with the fork. Quite the production when you're working with two!

Love chocolate chip, too, but didn't have any chips. And I get a hankering for the peanut butter ones more now.

Unless it's Callebaut chocolate... Then I am a hard-core addict!

I both feel for you in the heat, skdadl, but have a wee bit of envy at the same time. Hot nights are definitely over, here, it's getting to be time to close the windows at bedtime.

A friend was looking for an apple-honey cake for Rosh Hashanah (I may be the only goya hosting a Rosh Hashanah supper this weekend... its a long story) here is one that seems ageing-hippie enough for me, with no white sugar or flour... I'd add nuts though, and am not sure about all the orange juice. I don't like things that are very sweet, might toy with substituting some leftover espresso.

The poems, etc, are great.

Honey-Apple Cake ("Cooking Kosher: The Natural Way")

The days are growing shorter, the nights are no longer warm.

But my night-scented stocks! The air is alive with their cinnamon smell a lot earlier in the evenings now.

Fall harvest fruits and vegetables start making me think of upcoming holidays - Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en, my birthday, my son's birthday, Christmas. Makes me want to buy a bushel of apples and spend an entire day in the kitchen making apple pies, apple crisps, apple salads.

I think if there were any time for New Year's Resolutions for me, this time of year would be the time. Maybe I should have been Jewish so I could celebrate the new year now. I'll probably be doing my fall cleaning this weekend, perhaps tomorrow - today my father is coming in less than two hours to take the little one and I to the county fair in Picton.

Fall is the time of year when I feel most connected to the earth. I'm not much of a nature-girl really, but for some reason, Fall gives me the urge to walk everywhere (maybe because it's not so darned HOT anymore), to start cooking with fresh ingredients, and just to be aware of the life around me. Maybe it's because fall has always traditionally been connected to middle-to-elderly age, so you feel like you are more aware of life at that time of year than any other because in a month or two, the cold will make the outdoors beautiful but lifeless until the spring.

I usually adopt one of these spiders as a "pet". I'll monitor thier progress, and throw an insect tid-bit it's way from time to time.

I found one on my fence yesterday, and decided to adopt it.

Just this afternoon, I went to check on it, and it was gone from its customary spot in the center of the web. Just as I wondered where it had gotten to, a movement a few feet away caught my eye.

On a tired old leaf of my ornamental peas, a mud wasp was bundleing up my poor pet spider. There was little I could do as the wasp flew off with my "pet".

The second post is what I was writing a week later, just before I looked up to see Michelle's alert about the first plane, and then the second.

But still: we revived this once before and wrote to it in the spirit of the season.

I'm **NOT** ready to be hearing this kind of dirty language yet.

And I was thinking the same last night as we were swept by the last limp edges of Hurricane Frances. (sp?)

But today? Suddenly, it is sunny and warm and dry and clear again. The sky is so blue, so clear.