Autumn sights

We’re past the peak for fall color, and as the season mellows, other quieter beauties emerge.

November is coming, when Northeasterners hunker down for the long winter’s deprivation of color. I like to prepare myself with John Updike’s poem about November in A Child’s Calendar:

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The loss of her
Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness –

The beauty of the bone.