Playing Word Games in the Fall
The landscape is a little different than my last stay here. Summer is almost a memory, but the colors of fall have yet to appear. It’s a bit of an awkward age as far as nature is concerned. I was surprised to see big watermelons growing next to the porches both front and back. Apparently some of our summer renters must have had some seed spitting contests. Beautiful melons, heavy with juice. The withering flowers and brown grasses have a kind of simple beauty about them, inspiring me to write about it while driving this week.
Piedmont Autumn
A scent in the air
Freely wafting
No longer smothered under a blanket of humidity and labor’s sweat.
It’s still hot.
Long days of summer’s white hot light
Shift to shorter days of dawn and dusk
The scent haunts.
Rolls of hay
Bales of straw
Stubbled fields of corn
Pumpkins simmer in the field
The lonely watermelon begs for more time, clings, tenacious, to its withered umbilical vine, tethered forever to the season.
Needles once supple and green, drop like rain into rusty heaps
Dry and brittle under the tall pines that give life to the Piedmont.
Leaves, months ago buds of youthful anticipation
Sway, wrinkled and dry, a final tango with summer
Until a traitorous wind out of the North cuts in.
Box turtles burrow deep beneath the privet.
Monarchs and migrants all gone.
The Piedmont is quiet.
Waiting
To be stirred by the cold hand of winter.