"...the faded earth, the heavy sky...the beauties she so truly sees..."

Sometimes autumn is stunning. Brilliant reds, golds and greens against an azure sky.

Other times it is solemn, grey and moody. 

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,

  Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

  She walks the sodden pasture lane.         

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

  She talks and I am fain to list:

She’s glad the birds are gone away,

She’s glad her simple worsted gray

  Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

  The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

  And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

  The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

  And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost (1874–1963).

Today is one of those cold, grey November days. I want to put on a scarf and cable knit sweater and go walking through a forest, crunching the brown leaves underfoot.

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges.

- Jane Austen, Persuasion, Volume I, Chapter X

I hope you will embrace this grey season of transition. Without it, there would be no Spring.

“I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape---the loneliness of it---the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it---the whole story doesn't show.”

- Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
Maud Stone's, 1960
Watercolor on paper
21 1/4 x 29 1/2 inches
© Andrew Wyeth 1960