365 Project: October

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!" -Humbert Wolfe


October is a bittersweet month, as the northeast celebrates Autumn while moving inexorably towards the challenges of Winter.

The most popular photos this month were Adirondack Autumn, a glowing landscape


and Born Digital, a still life with glasses and book


My personal favorites were Ann Lee Pond (a painting created for our new kitchen by my talented husband)


and Soccer Dreams, since it represents a reconnection with my former students



You can see a slideshow of the 31 October photos here or view all of my 2009 photos to date here.

The two groups to which I contribute are 365/2009 and 2009/365.


"October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again." -Hal Borland

The Yellow Drift of Leaves

October is a month of bittersweet beauty. Nature's colors ignite in bursts of red, orange and yellow, then fade and crumble, finally yielding to winter's cold white majesty.

These four poets express some of the sadness and glory that is October.

October Journey

I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves,
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame
and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering
plain --

a glowing cauldron full of jeweled fire;
the emerald earth a dragon's eye
the poplars drenched with yellow light
and dogwoods blazing bloody red.
Traveling southward earth changes from gray rock to green velvet.
-Margaret Walker

The Love for October

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even if death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun
-W.S. Merwin




Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost

Autumn

...The leaves fall patiently
Nothing remembers or grieves
The river takes to the sea
The yellow drift of leaves...
-Sara Teasdale