When Spiders Rule
A chill wind blows the yellowing leaves off the trees. They drift down to the ground like giant snowflakes. The air is pregnant with the feel of the coming holidays. Fall has truly come with the sudden drop in temperatures. November appears as a mirror image of March. November is the vibrant color of decay while March is the decaying color of about-to-burst-forth Spring.
The birds are at the bird feeder all the time now. They are not stopped by our presence when we come to fill the feeder or blow leaves under it. Nothing stops them. They swoop around the feeder and the surrounding trees like Kamikaze pilots, darting here and there recklessly. The squirrels are in a frenzy as well, stock piling and burying acorns and walnuts which they will retrieve without fail in a month or so in a snow-covered land.
The trees are most beautiful for me at this time of year, when many of them are bare and a scattering of leaves remain on dark brown branches. The leaves that remain on the trees blow on the limbs with dainty grace in their precarious positions. Yet these are the survivors. The other leaves have fallen and gone the way all living things eventually go. Most trees have lost all their leaves and they stand in stark contrast against the blue sky, the stormy sky, even the night sky. They are perhaps most beautiful at night, like arms reaching up to the darkness trying to grab at the stars twinkling between the branches. Moonlight dances on their limbs.
November is the last glimmer of color and in some places the color seems to be predominantly yellow. A carpet of yellow lines the woods now. And now one can see inside the woods, so dark and impenetrable in summer. Some forests have carpets of oak leaves– dark brown tan in color. Or there are forest paths with variegated colors– vibrant crimsons against yellows and faded greens and tawny tans. The unmown lawns are now taken over by the spiders and, at moments, one can see a world of webs covering fields that only appear in a certain slant of sunlight. It is the silent take over of the spiders before the snows come.
The yellow, the brown, the crimson leaves are complemented by the ubiquitous yellow, brown and crimson mums that appear on the roadside near mail boxes, on porches or along driveways. These tough little flowers withstand frosty chills and stand tall throughout most of November. Hearty souls and so giving in their colorful, velvety splendor.
Soon the season of lights will begin. Autumn, as a season, seems the fastest to come and go. I hold each moment in my hands as a treasure, but the moments all sift through my fingers like grains of sand. Then Christmas comes and fades in a flash, and we are into the Nor’Easter blizzards of January. Another year is gone. The years do go faster as you grow older. We go about living our lives, trying, against our natures, to treasure the good moments. Now in November, at Thanksgiving, it is our time to say thank you. Inspired by the Native Americans let us thank the earth. Let us say thank you to the trees for their constantly changing beauty, to the stars for their piercing presence in the night sky, to the leaves for their beauteous colors, to the sun for its life-giving power, to the Spring for its awakening hope, to the Summer for its warm, thriving growth, to the Fall for its bounty, to the Winter for a time of renewal, to the snow flakes for their hushed, white silence that transforms our world, to the animals for their pure souls, to our families and friends for their love, and, lastly but mostly, to the Higher Power of our belief.
Happy Thanksgiving and may you each be blessed with the all embracing, pervasive Love in nature.
A Foretaste of Fall
(revised version)
It is the school-imposed end of summer, Labor Day weekend, a weekend I look forward to all summer long for the love of Fall. It is not good to be this way. Religious leaders preach living in the present for that is all we have. I have yet to overcome this and many other bad ways of thinking. I look forward to the crisp days of September when a breeze shimmers through, what I call in my ignorance of the real name, the penny tree. It is so named because when the wind blows the leaves look like so many pennies shimmering down from Heaven. I live for the days when the sun is so hot it tingles on the skin– yet it is not the strong sun of July that burns quickly. The angle of the sun in its diurnal slant is different. Summer is definitely slipping away.
The bees, wasps and yellow jackets are having a heyday in the goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed and Purple Loosestrife. The marsh is thick with flying insects going this way and that. My eyes capture swallowtails. Happily the monarchs are still here. A turkey vulture circles overhead. Some carrion must be nearby. Earlier we saw two golden hawks fly sunlit into the back field. A wisp of a cloud floats by in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. This summer has flown by in the blink of an eye like a fritillary flits by the flowers in the marsh.
The smell of fresh cut lawn is intoxicating to my raw senses. Soon the grass will cease to grow and the lush green will look washed out. All of its inhabitants in the metropolis beneath our feet will dig deep underground or turn off their bodily systems to overwinter– an amazing concept to a mammal. Some fill their bodies with a type of antifreeze. Nature never ceases to astound. This summer I have made my peace with the insects. Terrified of them as a child I have come to love and respect them, indeed hold them in awe for the feats they accomplish. Our accomplishments pale as humans, supposedly so superior.
No longer do I see turtles sunning on rocks or snakes coming out to bask in the heat of the road. Some species of birds have left already– unbeknownst to me. I just know that some I used to see are gone and the bird song of the spring mating season is a fleeting memory. One lone humming bird flies around the marsh intermittently, causing excitement upon spotting him.
It is the time to dead head the flowers of summer. It is the time of Black-Eyed Susans and Peonies and Sebum. And soon it will be the time of the Mums.
With each gust of wind yellow finger-like walnut leaves shower down on our heads– like large yellow snowflakes– a foretaste of snowfalls to come. The sun’s shadows grow long as twilight is near. Soon the white cloud “lions and tigers and bears” will retire into the black cave of night. And the summer will die and in dying, give birth to fall. The comfortable rhythm of the changing season beats in our sometimes unhearing hearts.
(Aknowledgements to “likes” and comments may be delayed. Recuperating from surgery.)
A Few of the Last Leaves Upstate
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“Cool Change”… Fall Upstate in Millbrook, New York
This was one of my brother’s (R.I.P.) favorite songs… “Cool Change” by Little River Band.
Autumnal Septuagenarian Love
Waking to your touch
electricity in
your massive
healing hands
without a glint
of sexuality…
Waking to your smile
whispers sweetly
to my soul…
like the first time
so long ago
on our first walk
together
when your arm
brushed against mine
and shook our worlds
out of their solitary
orbits and
sent us to the moon!
Your grey fluffy hair
sparkling silver threads
entices every time
I sniff your fragrance
and inhale the heavens
the warmth
of your cheeks
in our fleeting
embrace
I would it
would last forever
like our love!
The smile lines etched
around your sky blues
alter the pulse
the course of my blood
and with each glance
reach for the stars
twinkling inside my head!
The wrinkles in your cheeks
and your furrowed brow
pluck at the strings
inside my bosom
for I know the hard times
and worries that
engraved them on your face!
As day turns to night…
On the doorway
to Orpheus
in pillowed embrace
your big hand
holds mine
and makes me
feel safe and loved
and little
as you drift off
leaving me wishing
for morning
to awaken once
more to you
fears tears
so long to wait
till morning!
We are old
How did this happen?
and we are in love
more than ever
youthful passion gone
replaced by years of fidelity
affection, quarrels, laughing,
teasing, crying
always sharing, caring
yet attraction still stirs
and the years of together
have sewn our souls to one!
Loss is inevitable
and unacceptable
In equal measure
The God I used to find
in nature
I now find in you
And the ecstasis
of gazing at the sky
now rests with the mystery
of you!!
A happiest of birthdays to the love of our many lifetimes together! Hope to continue our journey together to enlightenment!
May the rest of your seventies be healthy and happy and filled with love!
💖Your wife
Beginnings & Endings
No one in my family liked summer. Probably because we lived in New York City and summer is not fun there. Moving upstate changed all that– up to a point. Although I must admit a weakness for those beautiful June days when the temperature reaches perfection, the sky is blue with fluffy clouds, and a soporific breeze wafts through the trees. And true, one has much more time with the four or five extra hours of sunlight. Still in all, when the first hints of fall come I am bordering on ecstatic.
First there is the change in light. The sun, still hot in mid-September, does not pack the punch it did in July, when one could be outdoors for an hour and come in with a change in skin color. Temperatures cool. The grass does not grow as fast. The “blood” of the trees starts to flow back into the trunk causing leaves to change color. Walnuts, acorns and apples fall. The bats leave the attic for warmer climes, giving us yet another chance to plug up holes inside to keep them outside next summer. Summer houses are closed down. The butterflies, that were so rampant outdoors in August are now inside the stomach of many a child with the start of school. Even adults are not immune. Many grown people feel the flutter of back-to-school anxiety come fall. After all September means “back to school” for many, many years. Time to “honker down” again and mean business. Fall offers a new beginning and there is a tinge of excitement added to the anxiety in facing some thing new.
And most of all, fall is a time of riotous color, when a walk in the woods finds one reveling like a drunk, besotted by the yellow, orange, crimson, russet world which our eyes imbibe like a hefty cocktail. It is a time when Italian comes to the lips in a loud “Que bella!!” The green of summer is bucolic and raises the spirit, but the many colors of fall intoxicate. People start talking of peak color, and leafing becomes the pastime of many. It is the time to plant bulbs and endlessly rake blowing leaves.
But fall is a time of melancholia, too. Flowers die. Reptiles go into hibernation. Insects die or overwinter. Songbirds migrate. Trees eventually loose their leaves. Anxiety over new beginnings can be uncomfortable. And the end of the lazy days of summer brings with it shorter days, longer nights, and possible depression for many people. Moments of sobriety seep into intoxication with the new world of color as we may remember loved ones who can no longer share the beauty. Who can no longer enjoy those cool crisp days in September, so coveted in August, when coolness brushes the cheeks.
For autumn is a celebration of endings, too, perhaps best described by the French poet, Guillaume Appollinaire, in his poem Autumn:
“A bowlegged peasant and his ox receding
through the mist slowly through the mist of autumn…
Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding.”
The Height Of November and Giving Thanks
(Click to enlarge)
A chill wind blows the yellowing leaves off the trees. They drift down to the ground like giant snowflakes. The air is pregnant with the feel of the coming holidays. Fall has truly come with the sudden drop in temperatures, a full 20 degrees cooler than a week ago. This is the real Fall, no mealy-mouthed disguised Fall, but a Fall that will guide us into winter appropriately. November appears as a mirror image of March. November is the vibrant color of decay while March is the decaying color of about-to-burst-forth Spring.
The birds are at the bird feeder all the time now. They are not stopped by our presence when we come to fill the feeder or blow leaves under it. Nothing stops them. They swoop around the feeder and the surrounding trees like Kamikaze pilots, darting here and there recklessly. The squirrels are in a frenzy as well, stock piling and burying acorns and walnuts which they will retrieve without fail in a month or so in a snow-covered land.
The trees are most beautiful for me at this time of year, when many of them are bare and a scattering of leaves remain on dark brown branches. The leaves that remain on the trees blow on the limbs with dainty grace in their precarious positions. Yet these are the survivors. The other leaves have fallen and gone the way all living things eventually go. Most trees have lost all their leaves and they stand in stark contrast against the blue sky, the stormy sky, even the night sky. They are perhaps most beautiful at night, like arms reaching up to the darkness trying to grab at the stars twinkling between the branches. Moonlight dances on their limbs.
November is the last glimmer of color and in some places the color seems to be predominantly yellow. A carpet of yellow lines the woods now. And now one can see inside the woods, so dark and impenetrable in summer. Some forests have carpets of oak leaves– dark brown tan in color. Or there are forest paths with variegated colors– vibrant crimsons against yellows and faded greens and tawny tans. The unmown lawns are now taken over by the spiders and, at moments, one can see a world of webs covering fields that only appear in a certain slant of sunlight. It is the silent take over of the spiders before the snows come.
The yellow, the brown, the crimson leaves are complemented by the ubiquitous yellow, brown and crimson mums that appear on the roadside near mail boxes, on porches or along driveways. These tough little flowers withstand frosty chills and stand tall throughout most of November. Hearty souls and so giving in their colorful, velvety splendor.
The Halloween pumpkins begin to sag a bit or shine with wetness as if encased in glass. They will soon be tossed, pine combs and wreathes and fir swags will take their places, and the season of lights will begin. Like a child I am filled with anticipation of what is to come although all the spiritual guides teach us to live in the moment. I try to live in the moment all Autumn for as a season it seems the fastest to come and go. I try to hold each moment in my hands as a treasure but they all sift through my fingers like grains of sand. Then Christmas comes and fades in a flash and we are into the Nor’Easter blizzards of January. Another year is gone. The years do go faster as you grow older. Every one has their favorite theory why this is so. I think it is “to-do” lists. They rob us of time as we run around like Kamikaze birds or frenzied squirrels to check things off. And our reliance on calendars. We turn to mark things in our appointment books months ahead of time effortlessly flipping through the seasons with a flick of the wrist. It is no wonder time flies. We are in August and planning Christmas. I am fighting this in November with half the Fall gone: “Stop! Stop!” I try in vain to wish time would stand still so we could be in forever Thanksgiving/Christmas. But, being human, we would soon tire of that. It is good we are defenseless against time.
We go about living our lives, trying against our natures to treasure the good moments. Now in November, at Thanksgiving, it is our time to say thank you. Inspired by the Native Americans let us thank the earth. Let us say thank you to the trees for their constantly changing beauty, to the stars for their piercing presence in the night sky, to the leaves for their inspiring colors, to the sun for its life-giving power, to the Spring for its awakening hope, to the Summer for its warm, thriving growth, to the Fall for its bounty, to the Winter for a time of renewal, to the snow flakes for their hushed, white silence that transforms our world, to the animals for their pure souls, to our families and friends for their love, and, lastly but mostly, to the Higher Power of our belief.
Happy Thanksgiving and may you each be blessed with the all embracing, pervasive Love in nature.
And They All Fall Down… and Become Just a Memory… Too Fast… the Scintillating Colors of Fall…
(Click to enlarge all photos)
Glimpses of Fall #2
VERY SORRY– THINK MY VIDEO DIDN’T SHOW ON THE FIRST TRY… THE PICTURES ARE THE MAIN THING TO SEE– HOPE THEY APPEAR NOW…
(Click to enlarge)
A tribute to Fall, and to my brother, Tony, gone 15 years now… his favorite song, “Cool Change” by the Little River Band and photos I took around Millbrook, New York. Miss both very much!
Glimpses of Fall
VERY SORRY– THINK MY VIDEO DIDN’T SHOW ON THE FIRST TRY… THE PICTURES ARE THE MAIN THING TO SEE– HOPE THEY APPEAR NOW…
(Click to enlarge)
A tribute to Fall, and to my brother, Tony, gone 15 years now… his favorite song, “Cool Change” by the Little River Band and photos I took around Millbrook, New York. Miss both very much!
Beginnings & Endings
(Click to enlarge)
No one in my family liked summer. Probably because we lived in New York City and summer is not fun there. Moving upstate changed all that– up to a point…though I must admit to a weakness for those beautiful June days when the temperature reaches perfection, the sky is blue with fluffy clouds, and a soporific breeze wafts through the trees. And true, one has much more time with the four or five extra hours of sunlight. Still in all, when the first hints of fall come I am bordering on ecstatic.
First there is the change in light. The sun, still hot in mid-September, does not pack the punch it did in July, when one could be outdoors for an hour and come in with a change in skin color. Temperatures cool. The grass does not grow as fast. The “blood” of the trees starts to flow back into the trunk causing leaves to change color. Walnuts, acorns and apples fall. The bats leave for warmer climes, giving us yet another chance to plug up holes inside to keep them outside next summer. Ads start to appear in early August for “Back to School” specials, bringing the butterflies, that were so rampant outdoors in August, inside the stomach of many a child. Even adults are not immune. Many grown people feel the flutter of back-to-school anxiety come fall. After all September means “back to school” for many, many years. Time to “honker down” again and mean business. Fall offers a new beginning and there is a tinge of excitement added to the anxiety in facing something new.
And most of all, fall is a time of riotous color, when a walk in the woods finds one reveling like a drunk, besotted by the yellow, orange, crimson, russet world which our eyes imbibe like a hefty cocktail. It is a time when Italian comes to the lips in a loud “Que bella!! (“How beautiful!!”) The green of summer is bucolic and raises the spirit, but the many colors of fall intoxicate. People start talking of peak color, and leafing becomes the pastime of many. It is the time to plant bulbs and endlessly rake blowing leaves.
But fall is a time of melancholia, too. Flowers die. Reptiles go into hibernation. Insects die or overwinter. Songbirds migrate. Trees eventually loose their leaves. Anxiety over new beginnings can be uncomfortable. And the end of the lazy days of summer brings with it shorter days, longer nights, and possible depression for many people. Moments of sobriety seep into intoxication with the new world of color as we may remember loved ones who can no longer share the beauty…who can no longer enjoy those cool, crisp days in September when coolness brushes the cheeks… days so coveted in August. For autumn is a celebration of endings, too, perhaps best described by the French poet, Guillaume Appolinaire, in his poem Autumn:
A bow-legged peasant and his ox receding
Through the mist slowly through the mists of autumn
Which hides the shabby and sordid villages
And out there as he goes the peasant is singing
A song of love and infidelity
About a ring and a heart which someone is breaking
Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding
When the Walnut Leaves Begin to Fall
(Open to full screen) (39 seconds long)
Labor Day weekend, a weekend I look forward to all summer long for the love of Fall, is here. It is not good to be this way. Religious leaders preach living in the present… for that is all we have. Another lesson to learn. This year for some reason I am feeling melancholic about the summer ending. Perhaps because it is a perfect day. A breeze shimmers through what I call the penny tree for when the wind blows the leaves look like so many pennies shimmering down from Heaven. The sun is so hot it tingles on the skin– yet it is not the strong sun of July that burns quickly. The angle of the sun in its diurnal slant is different. Summer is definitely slipping away.
The bees, wasps and yellow jackets are having a heyday in the goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed and Purple Loosestrife. The marsh is thick with flying insects going this way and that. My eyes capture swallowtails. Happily the monarchs are still here. A turkey vulture circles overhead. Some carrion must be nearby. Earlier we saw two golden hawks fly sunlit into the back field. A wisp of a cloud floats by in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. This summer has flown by in the blink of an eye like a fritillary flits by the flowers in the marsh.
The smell of fresh cut lawn is intoxicating to my raw senses. Soon the grass will cease to grow and the lush green will look washed out. All of its inhabitants in the metropolis beneath our feet will dig deep underground or turn off their bodily systems to overwinter– an amazing concept to a mammal. Some fill their bodies with a type of antifreeze. Nature never ceases to astound. This summer I have made my peace with the insects. Terrified of them as a child, I have come to love and respect them, indeed hold them in awe for the feats they accomplish. Our accomplishments pale as humans, supposedly so superior.
No longer do I see turtles sunning on rocks or snakes coming out to bask in the heat of the road. Some species of birds have left already– unbeknownst to me. I just know that some I used to see are gone and the bird song of the spring mating season is a fleeting memory. One lone humming bird flies around the marsh intermittently, causing excitement upon spotting him.
It is the time to dead head the flowers of summer. It is the time of Black-Eyed Susans and Peonies and Sebum. And soon it will be the time of the Mums.
With each gust of wind yellow finger-like walnut leaves shower down on our heads– like large yellow snowflakes– a foretaste of snowfalls to come. The sun’s shadows grow long as twilight is near. Soon the white cloud lions and tigers and bears will retire into the black cave of night. And the summer will die and in dying, give birth to fall. The comfortable rhythm of the changing season beats in our sometimes unhearing hearts.
The Trees of Late Fall & the Promise of Winter
(Click to enlarge)
Bontecou Lake Swamp, Millbrook, New York
Every year what budded in autumn blossoms full blown in the weeks before official winter– my love affair with trees. Trees that were drop-dead gorgeous in their fall colors are now bare, with the exception of evergreens and a few stray deciduous trees that refuse to relinquish their leaves. Now the trees are stripped down to their souls and their souls sing a siren song to the universe.
The tops of trees lift my spirit; brushlike they paint the sky the baby pinks and blues of mornings, and the majestic magentas and violets of day’s end. Each tree has its signature shape against the sky, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, similar yet each unique. Some treetops in their bare state are shaped like a fancy coiffure; others look like wrought iron filigree. On distant mountains, against the snowy ground, some look like stubble on an old man’s unshaven face.
It is the cold, colorful pre-winter sky showing through, and showing off, the bare branches that woos me. The bare curvaceous branches are stark, dark lines against the bright of day and the inky sky of night. These resplendent creatures are living lines that explode. Branches tangle like the lines in a Jackson Pollock painting. Others curve in the sensuous lines of a Brancusi sculpture. Buxom tree trunks stand strong surrounded by their colorful, dead blossoms amid the ground cover and their burgeoning berries, the offspring of a Renaissance Madonna. In truth these trees are not like art at all. Rather art imitates them– their beauty provides the timeless inspiration for artists, writers and poets of all ages and styles.
Trees not only inspire, they themselves are paragons of diversity. One look out of a car window while driving on the Taconic and one can see squat pines alongside towering majestic firs, birches interspersed with maple and oak. And together the different brown and tan barks interspersed with evergreens create not only a mosaic of contrasting colors, but display an example to inspire humans to live together in peaceful unity.
These beneficent beings carry the heavy, dark grey clouds of winter. When it snows the tree trunks become canvases for the abstract patterns of windblown-snow, while the serpentine branches are outlined in white. In ice storms their branches become chandeliers, each enveloped in glassine ice. While in the melancholy of a winter rain, the branches become oiled skins of snakes weeping to the ground below. And finally, in the night sky, the branches hold the stars in their arms, those with leaves holding them in their hands, as they nurse the moon.
All trees, no matter what their species, age or height, stand tall in proud humility, their arms reaching up to the Heavens to our Creator in prayer– soft-spoken beings of peace and tranquility towering over us, while we wee, little creatures race around distractedly below.
(Click to enlarge)
Hammond Road, Millbrook, NY
Realism and Abstraction no.2
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Autumn in the Quarry in Millbrook, NY
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Autumn Next Door in Millbrook, NY
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Autumn in our Front Yard, Millbrook, NY
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Millbrook in Autumn– from Realism to Abstraction
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MOONSIDE 
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