“October comes and one walks with autumn in the city park, along the suburban street, beside the country road and in every woodland.  For October is the time of the falling leaf, the ripened nut, the earthy browns, the vivid yellows and sere tans, by aster-purples and the sumac-reds, the transformed leftovers of summer shade, bringing the brilliance of autumn down to earth around us…October…is achievement.  And now nature’s urgencies are past.  This is the time of ripeness, of wholeness, of plenty….I could go out in the upper pasture and sit for an hour, and I would be in the very midst of the bounty, the beauty, the wholeness that makes the year complete without cutting it off from yesterday or tomorrow.  All I would have to do would be to lift my face to the sky, that incredibly blue sky of a perfect October day, and open the pores of my understanding.  The maples are like sunrise, and the oaks are like a stormy sky at dusk, and the ash trees that line the lower fencerow are almost as blue as the sky itself.  The pasture grasses are still green, but the thistle heads are being ragged out into glistening clouds by the goldfinches.  The squirrels have harvested the hickory nuts and the butternuts, leaving heaps of hulls of evidence of the plenty.  The chipmunks have their granaries stocked and sit in the sun, even as I do, contemplating this marvelous world, the world of wealth in which to share.  The crows proclaim their sovereignty, now that the flickers and kingbirds are gone, and the jays scream dissent at a distant.  And overhead is, or soon will be, the gabble of geese.  I could stay, but the geese and my heart say go.  Go, and see the truth of October, know the enduring reality of this land I love.  Hal Borland in an essay, “A Song for October”.

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