Autumn

"This is the season of the spider,' Mr Payton said, and it was certainly true. Everywhere, tossing among the reeds, were little beaded cloths of web, and now and then they came on a larger kind, each wearing a dressy black-and-yellow spider and marked with a silky track as if the artist had signed his name.

-Gone Away Lake, Elizabeth Enright

I love this book, and this passage, and this season. Autumn is by far and away my favorite time of year. I revel in cool, almost chilly mornings; in dew beginning to take on the crisp white of frost; of the vivid red-orange-yellow and the trees shedding their summer finery and revealing their bones.

Each of us has a season when we, too, must shed the disguises, the pretenses to fleeting beauty, and reveal who we really are, really, underneath it all. We must not spend our entire lives trying to portray a face that is not ours.

There. I'm done being philosophical for the day.

"Did you ever notice how people call leaves leaves all the rest of the year but in the fall they call them foliage?" said Julian.

-ditto