"The sky was so blue today, I just had to be a part of it..."

Yet more roses!

"The sky was so blue today, and everything was so fresh and green, I just had to be a part of it; and the Untersberg kept leading me higher and higher, as though it wanted me to go right through the clouds with it."
 - Maria in The Sound of Music

This morning we had the first real frost of the season. Well, it wasn't quite the first frost - we had a few light ones about a month ago, but this was the first one to mean business; and I very much hope it heralds the beginning of some real, prolonged wintry weather; all this unseasonal warmth was beginning to get unnerving...

 Take this week for instance. The sun has shone so strongly, and the sky has been so blue, that it has been simply crying out to me to be a part of it, and if Maria could not withstand such temptations, who I am to refuse them? I did not even try...

And while I was imitating Maria (as well as I could for a distinct lack of mountains) I thought I might as well imitate the spirit of Elizabeth von Arnim in her German Garden again. So I sat on the patio, well wrapped up in a Royal Stuart shawl, and did some sketching. All I needed to complete the picture was a little snow and some big furry gloves...

"Season of mists..."

We have been having the most beautiful late-afternoon skies recently. The sun has started setting right at the end of the garden, instead at the end of our neighbours garden as it does in the summer, and it seems to be bigger, too. Every evening (unless it's overcast) I can see it hanging in a great big orange ball, low down behind the skeletal branches of the trees; to either side the colour seeps out along the horizon, orange, golden yellow, pink, lilac, fading out at last to a pale blue.

The mornings are beautiful too, only in a different way. Most days now I awake to a thick mist lying over the fields, making the woods behind look all blue and smoky and mysterious; and up above (again, so long as it's not overcast) the sky is a translucent pearly blue backdrop behind the sun-stroked pine tree, with little golden wisps of cloud draped here and there, in a careless, artistic fashion. I do love autumn!

The Old Man...

"It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring;
 he went to bed and bumped his head,
 and couldn't get up in the morning."

Which, along with the traumatic tale of Dr Foster's catastrophic attempt to visit the town of Gloucester, only goes to show what a perilous business rain can be...

"This is a changing world, my dear..."

"This is a changing world my dear - new songs are sung, new stars appear; though we grow older year by year, our hearts can still be gay." - Noel Coward

The other morning I awoke to find the world wrapped in a thick autumn mist. As the day wore on, it gradually lifted from over the garden to reveal late roses still heavy with dew; above the pine tree, the thick white covering played hide-and-seek with a weak blue sky; and beyond the hedge the field remained invisible beneath its blanket.

"I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds." John 12: 24                                                                     

Magdalen College, Oxford

Usually October is a month of constant change - a chance for nature to adjust gradually from summer to autumn. This year however it remained late summer for weeks and weeks until, all at once, the leaves changed colour and started falling to the ground, where they lie growing in piles of firey orange and bronze, just waiting to be gleefully kicked and scattered by ecstatic children.

As the spidery sprays of bare twigs begin to appear silhouetted against the sky, which itself seems to sink lower above the rooftops - and as the evenings steadily close in, I feel as though the world is dying. Of course, I know it will come alive again in the spring, but that doesn't stop the sadness now: nature is in mourning.

I think the seasons are rather like the cycle of a butterfly, with autumn being the time when the caterpillar begins to build itself the chrysalis of winter; sometimes, what looks like death is just the beginning of greater life...

No!

       No sun -- no moon!
       No morn -- no noon --
No dawn -- no dusk -- no proper time of day --
       No sky -- no earthly view --
       No distance looking blue --
No road -- no street -- no 't'other side the way' --
       No end to any Row --
       No indications where the Crescents go --
       No top to any steeple --
No recognitions of familiar people --
       No courtesies for showing 'em --
       No knowing em'! --
No travelling at all -- no locomotion --
No inkling of the way -- no notion --
        'No go' -- by land or ocean --
        No mail -- no post --
No news from any foreign coast --
No Park -- no Ring -- no afternoon gentility --
        No company -- no nobility --
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
   No comfortable feel in any member --
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
   No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds --
       November!
                                                    Thomas Hood