Autumn!

The stripped and shapely

Maple grieves

The ghosts of her

Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,

As hard as stone.

The year is old,

The birds are flown.

And yet the world,

In its distress,

Displays a certain

Loveliness---

-   John Updike, A Child's Calendar

I love it!

Confessions of a closet peeper…

We complain a fair amount about leaf peepers here in New England.  This time of year, the traffic gets heavier, people drive like maniacs and there are more busses on the road.  Getting from point A to point B can sometimes be challenging.  Even so, Greg and I are not above doing a little leaf peeping ourselves.  In truth, it was our plan to load Olive, the pug, into the car and to drive up into southern Vermont this weekend to see how the leaves are changing there, but things conspired against us and we never made it.  So yesterday, even though the weather was a bit overcast, we went ahead and did a short tour of Vermont.

Starting out here in south central Massachusetts, the day was pretty nice.  The sky was mostly blue but the leaves are quite a way from being at peak.

Still even here, now and then, we saw patches of true autumn color.

As we traveled north and west, the sky got more and more overcast, but the leaves were more and more colorful.

Of course, it is my humble opinion that Vermont is the most beautiful place in this country no matter what the time of year, but in the fall, it has beauty that is beyond words.

Driving around staring at all that color makes one a bit peckish, so as we were heading home, we pulled into a little place that sold ice cream and each had a small cone.  This is what a pug looks like when she thinks that she deserves a lick of your ice cream.  She can hold that pose for quite a while.

It was a nice day in spite of the less than stellar weather.

  I just love this time of year!

Hunting for color…

“There are so many colors in the rainbow,

 so many colors in the morning sun,

 so many colors in the flower

 and I can see every one.”

~ Harry Chapin

The prompts for this week’s Scavenger Hunt seemed easy to me when I wrote them down last Sunday.  After all, what could be easier than Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue.  Then I started to think.  It has been so gloomy  and cloudy around here that going on a color search outside didn’t seem to be the answer.   And, of course, there are no flowers to be had this time of year  in the great Northeast, unless buying out the grocery store or florist is the answer.  But, I actually thought about the grocery again to find my colors.  "Why not buy vegetables and fruits for the project?" I thought.  But, in the end, I simply went around the house and gathered up stuff.  Since I love color, that wasn't so hard.

LINKING TO ASHLEY SISK'S 

SCAVENGER HUNT SUNDAY.

Hunting…

I found the prompts for this week (paint, green, eyelashes, shapes and clouds) particularly challenging, but I managed to come up with something for every one.

PAINT:  My medium has always been fabric and thread.  In my case, these are paint.

GREEN:  Until yesterday we have had very little rain this summer so it is a wonder that I found this very green field to photograph.

EYELASHES:  My son Evan was kind enough to let me take a few pics of his eyes to use for the eyelashes prompt.

SHAPES:  Since I was a kid, I’ve liked working jigsaw puzzles.  While I had cats, I couldn’t manage to keep them from stealing and hiding pieces so I gave it up for a while.  Remind me some day to tell you about the LEGO castle my son and I built together that my cat Asta took apart piece by piece.  Asta was also famous for carrying around Barbie doll heads and dropping them where ever she thought they would create the most drama.  Now that I don’t have any cats, I can work puzzles in peace and if there were still Barbies around here, they would be safe.  I’d rather have cats actually.

CLOUDS:  We had some pretty gorgeous and dramatic clouds drifting in and out of New England this week.  

Linking to Scavenger Hunt Sunday @ www.ashleysisk.com