Autumn

Autumn in the Ashburton Domain

I think John Keats says it best:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

    With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

    And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

        For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

    Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

    Steady thy laden head across a brook;

    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring?  Ay, where are they?

    Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

    And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

    Among the river sallows, borne aloft

        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Llamas

Got something to say?  Why not say it in Llama?

Small Moments

Am loving this poem by Dallas Clayton ...

A SMALL MOMENT IN MY DAY

At the counter
inside the gas station
sits a bowl of apples
with a hand-written sign
which reads:
APPLES.

Beside the apples:
a bunch of bananas.

They have no sign.

“Did people have trouble identifying the apples by sight?”
I ask as the woman counts my change.

She stops
then looks over the fruit
perplexed
as if I have just asked the most important
question she has heard in
six months time.

She stares blankly for a long moment
then says

“I don’t know

I usually work on the weekends.”

Coffee and a Chat

Via Pinterest (of course)

This morning Z, my lovely 8 year old nephew, offered to make me a coffee.  I gave him instructions - which he followed - and after he had reassured himself that the coffee was to my liking he rushed off to make himself a Milo so we could sit at the kitchen table and chat.

What a truly fab way to start the day!!

A Good Pair of Boots

Source: freepeople.com via Anya on Pinterest

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

— Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms)

Pinterest

Source: juliasegal.tumblr.com via Dorothy on Pinterest

Because you find cool things like this there ... 

Soup

Source: simplesong.typepad.com via Whitney on Pinterest

At this end of the world summer is drawing to a close.   Yesterday we lit the fire for the first time this year and I made my first pot of soup (creamy lentil & vegetable - thanks Alison Holst!!) of the season.  Ahhhh, season of mist and mellow fruitfullness ...