Words for Autumn

Here in California, we had a wonderful rainy day yesterday.  Wonderful, because it's the time of year where some are anxious for Autumn.  If you live someplace cold, compare this feeling to how you feel in the April or May, when it's still cold but you're told it's Spring.  So I bundled up this week and worked on my new novel.  Soup for lunch, slippers on until I had to fetch the kids.  Autumn. 

This morning, I wanted to write something about the season, so I went looking for words of inspiration and well... I've found that everything about Autumn, and October, has already been said in a thousand lovely ways.  So I'll keep imagining the glorious leaf colors (because we'll have to wait a good while longer for any of that), and I'll save my words for the novel, and share these with you.

"All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."         - Thomas Wolfe

 "The sweet calm sunshine of October, now
    Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mold
The purple oak-leaf falls; the birchen bough
    drops its bright spoil like arrow-heads of gold."     -   William Cullen Bryant

"October is nature's funeral month.  Nature glories in death more than in life.  The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May.  Every green thing loves to die in bright colors."     -   Henry Ward Beecher  

"O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away."-   Robert Frost, October

Like someone who opens a door of glass
or sees his own reflection in it
when he returns from the woods
the light falls so variously here at the end of October
that nothing is whole or can be made into a whole
because the cracks are too uncertain and constantly moving.

Then you experience the miracle
of entering into yourself like a diamond
in glass, enjoying its own fragility
when the storm carries everything else away
including the memory of a freckled girlfriend
out over the bluing lake hidden behind the bare hills."-   Henrik Nordbrandt,  The Glass Door
    Translated by Thomas Satterlee 

"Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause
between the opposing miseries of summer and winter." -   Carol Bishop Hipps