In imitation of L M Montgomery...

 "The evening was still. Across the field, the Haseley woods stood silhouetted against the burnished gold of the dying sun, their black outline softened and blurred in the fading light. Close at hand, holding sway over the darkening garden, stood the maritime pine, its branches uplifted in a wild, proud stance before the silky backdrop of the violet-coloured twilight sky; and behind it, looking so close to the earth that one could almost reach out and touch it, a delicate sliver of silver moon shone brightly, cradling the dim round shadow of the old moon in its arms..."

A warm wind doth blow...

"Where has the winter gone?
The warm winds have sent it away.
The ice has thawed,
The skies have cleared,
And spring is dancing once more."

Which is a little premature, perhaps, but not much...

After a week or so of proper, sharp, wintery weather, with flurries of hail and snow, and hard frosts that froze the pond over, the weather has warmed up again; my thick aran cardigan has returned to the depths of the wardrobe, and winter-visiting red polls have disappeared once more from the bird-feeders. Even the roses, after a few mornings of frost-bite, and have continued to bloom. What a difference from last year, when by this time we had become snow-bound for the second time.

Wheezles and Sneezles

"Christopher Robin

Had wheezles

And sneezles,

They bundled him

Into

His bed.

They gave him what goes

With a cold in the nose

And some more for a cold

In the head."

A A Milne

I have the beginnings of my first winter cold. Could it be the result of too much star-and-moon gazing out of my single-glazed bedroom window in the early hours of the morning? I did notice the other night, as I drew back the curtain to look in awe at the brightness and beauty before me, that a sheet of exceedingly cold air seemed to be lying in wait. However...
The scene that met my eyes, as I braved the cold air, was quite clearly a stage set:
A smooth lawn, pale grey in the moonlight, lay spread out before me, with two apple trees set diagonally to each other half-way down. The deep shadows of the great pine, that rose up majestically behind, spread over the whole; and everything was so still, and the bright light of the moon, that lay fat and serene amongst the stars, seemed to make everything almost as bright as day, only in a colourless, grey-ish green sort of way, that the entire affect was slightly surreal. It was the sort of night when I could quite easily believe in the reality of Tom's Midnight Garden.

"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...