Autumn

Three people I used to know fairly well at various times in my life have died this year. One was a childhood friend I hadn't seen since the Nixon adminstration (our lives diverged); the other two were midlife colleagues and friends from the book business I lost touch with when I retired. As far as I know, all three were active and healthy a year ago. Unsettlingly, all three were also more or less my age — but that's how it goes, you know. Once you reach a certain age, if your contemporaries aren't starting to predecease you it's only because you're the one to go first.

In the meantime, the political condition of the country is as bad as it's been in my lifetime, and there seems to be no prospect of improvement in the offing. The people holding the reins are not only corrupt and sociopathic but actually grotesque; that many of us are endorsing this or accommodating ourselves to it is the surest indication that the republic as a whole is politically and morally dead. We no longer seem able to discern right from wrong or true from false, but that's hardly surprising when our public and private lives are increasingly given over to fakery and superficiality. (End of screed.)

And suddenly the seasons have changed. In spite of some lovely mild October weather, I'm waking in the dark and in the cold now. Afternoons still linger a bit but that will change when we turn the clocks back. After a seemingly endless (and mostly rainless) summer it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it will be half a year before I can start planting things outdoors again.

The corn and peaches are gone from the local farmstands and weekend markets, but there are pumpkins and winter squashes and beautiful apples in abundance. I've broken out the first Dickens for winter reading and the jigsaw puzzles await patiently in their cardboard boxes.

The wild turkeys above are from a group of twelve that overnighted in a local graveyard. Just down the road at our favorite local farm there's a small flock of their white domestic cousins enjoying their last weeks of life before Thanksgiving. The world turns, and the harvest goes on.