FALL COLORS

Here's photographer Robert Baxter's Sunday photo of fall colors along the Suwannee.

John Muir wrote that Florida has only two seasons, summer and hot summer, but I'm unwilling to leave the word "autumn" up north. Having suffered through our long, "hot" summer, many of us greet cooler, breezier days with enormous pleasure. The seasons mark change and this year the season is about more than a change of weather.

Coming home from Live Oak in the dark Friday night, I was startled to see two lit jack o'lanterns the size of Volkswagen Beetles. There are quite a few country yards decked out in orange and black, witches, cats, and scarecrows. There's something else I'm seeing more and more often this season. I am surprised by the things I see people selling as I pass by their trucks, tents, and signs like one Friday evening at a mailbox that read: "Moving Sale - Furniture." I'm certain there are more roadside sales than ever before and I'm pretty sure I know why.


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As happy counterpart to these sober roadside thoughts, my friend Wendy Garrison's CD was playing as I drove. Wendy and two other women in Oxford, MS, call their new band "Maybelle's Lovers"and the music on this CD testifies to their love of movement and sound; I sure do like that slide guitar.

Here's a poem from my first fall season (2002) in this stilt-legged house on the floodplain of Florida's Suwannee River:

NO REASON TO MOURN SUMMER

The voice of an unknown bird,
a grate severing night from sunrise,
scratches at the sky and I leave my bed,
lean southeast over the porch railing
just as he rasps again. No movement
along the limbs of the oak, the cypress, the pine.
River so low, I can’t see it. Again his voice lifts
morning’s soft face.

A mile away on the Florida Trail,
translucent stems of Indian Pipe
force their way out of the ground, white
flowers left by a ghost. Mushrooms litter
the sides of the trail, white as the muscle
in God’s own eye. The orange flames
in the fallen needles of the pine, muted now;
the ferns will soon lie down, flattened and brown.

But this is no reason to mourn summer,
not when trillions of jewels will flash
in the upturned purple bowl of night, come dusk.
In the bird’s call I hear all of this and the generosity
of the day spreads out before me. Like doors
opening on leather hinges in some ancient cloister
this new voice heralds
the glad strangeness of large hours.