AUTUMNAL EQUINOX

I REALIZE YOU'VE SEEN this picture before and there's little doubt but that you'll see it again if I'm here in the autumn of 2012. It's my favorite of our collection of fall photos.

To be honest, Spring is my favorite season of the year, with all the opening buds and resurrection of plant life, but next I would choose autumn even though there's a note of melancholy to it. Best of all is that first night when it's cool enough to reach down and pull up a blanket. I love that.

This morning when we were leaving our apartment to meet friends for breakfast, we found two bags on the doorknob. You see only one here because I staged it. Four times a year we experience this, with each equinox.





This year's card read:

inside was a large, nut-encrusted muffin.

At the same time last year this is what we discovered on our doorknob:

It pleases me  when people commemorate the seasons this way. Celebration should be a daily thing, methinks. There's always something to pay tribute to. Not that I always do it, but when it happens, it's a wondrous thing.

Young Son Tim is helping a friend move today so his usual Sunday visit was moved to Saturday. I needed a few things from the market. Mr. Bob declined our invitation to join us, preferring to take a nap at home. I waited in the car while Tim ran in to Trader Joe's to get the few things on my list which did not include the mini pumpkin he proudly showed me. He was moved to get it for me in celebration of autumn. That's my boy!

"Oh how we love pumpkin season.  You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right?  Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin.... We anxiously anticipate it every year."                                                       

                  Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer, October 2010

PURPLE

IT'S THE PURPLE TIME of year in Southern California and according to a flickr friend who lives in Spain, it is there, too, for it's the season that the jacaranda trees bloom.

They make a statement, standing out against the darker greens of normal trees

As the flowers mature, they fall and carpet the ground beneath them and because there are 2 sides to every coin, the fallen blossoms can be a bit nasty when tracked inside.

I know that, for when Once Upon a Time was on the corner, we had a jacaranda tree just outside our door.

In the view we have from our 4th floor window, I watched a distant cloud of grey turn, day by day, into a billow of purple.

I once, on half of a postcard, painted by memory my rendition of jacaranda trees,
In that memory they signal the end of the school year and I recall seeing them as we drove to the harbor to board a ferry headed for a week on the island of Catalina. Funny how certain impressions linger.

Cañada Blvd. is lined with purple loveliness this time of year. We may not have the raging fire of color that New England rightfully boasts about in the fall, but we can claim purple Junes in our neck of the woods.

AUTUMN LEAVE-TAKING

"Autumn.. the year's last, loveliest smile. "

                                --William C. Bryant

The winter solstice will be here before we know it. This year it will occur on December 21 at 11:38 p.m. That's the same date that our Alaska visitors will arrive, but more about that later.

I love the above photo and those of you who have been constant readers all these years will have seen it before. It was taken when we were enroute to a jazz festival in Sun Valley, Idaho and I don't remember which state we were in at the time......perhaps it was Utah. The shot shows so clearly the path that water takes in its descent from the mountain. 


I'm sure we all have memories of particular autumns; jumping in piles of dried leaves as kids and if you're old enough, you'll recall the resulting bonfires after leaves were raked into those pyramid shaped heaps. I remember the year we, along with some members from our church, were on a fall foliage tour of New England and I fell ill suddenly with chills and fever. Riding in a bus with my head on Mr. Bob's lap, I opened my eyes now and then to catch glimpses of blazing red maple leaves that filled the whole window pane. It was the most intense color imaginable. I've heard it said that the fall color there is so vivid that even the memories of people who live in New England, can't retain the marvel of it and each fall brings a new sense of wonder. 

In the Western states, the aspens are prevalent and the quaking gold leaves are a sight to behold.


So often, people in other parts of the country express pity for those of us who live in California where, they think, we have no change of seasons.


We may have to look hard and stay aware, but I contend that we do have seasons even though the weather often turns unseasonably warm when we're least expecting it.

Our front lawn, before we moved to the Manor, would be filled with liquidambar leaves, which reminds me.......... Leo Buscaglia
used to be the "Love Professor" at USC and one autumn when students were holding a class in his home, a neighbor knocked on the door, asking Mr. Buscaglia if he might rake the leaves from his front lawn, and Mr. B. declined, but took the students outside where they all took part in carrying armloads of leaves inside, laying a thick carpet of them on the floor, from whence the lesson continued.

A nearby, Southern California sighting

Even here at the Manor, someone had the idea of strewing a few fallen leaves along a side table, bringing the outdoors in.














Just a few minutes ago, I looked out our window to the postage stamp sized park across the way and this is what I saw:

"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. "

                                                                  ~P. D. James