The First of October

The days grow shorter....

It is dark when I waken and I am tempted to turn and snuggle in the warmth of the bed, until I think of Bruce's bladder, and up I rise, calling to him to come and greet the day.  He's a sweet dog, and wakes with a smile and great enthusiasm as he lifts his leg!!!

The garden is toying with the idea of slumber, but you know how it is, preparing to go to bed.  It doesn't all happen at once, and so we are spending pleasant hours outside these days, Callie and Bruce and I, dead-heading, gathering up barrow loads of compost material, saving seeds of the nicotiana and finding a spot for the potted foxgloves that didn't bloom this year, but surely will next summer.

I am making a pot pourri of garden herbs, drying them slowly and then sieving them as needed.

In the meantime the garden goes about its business - the fall flowers bloom profusely.  Especially the asters whose blossoms swarm with bees when they open to the sunshine in the morning...

I am continually snipping off yellow daisies who have done their thing, and now grow old and dry and withered as old things (and people) are wont to do.....  The blooms that take their place are smaller, but never ending.....

The lilies and the peonies have donned their autumn colours....

but look - the honeysuckle is in bloom again...

and at irregular intervals the lovely chinese lantern

marks the spot where the chinese rail line has 

established a station....

Mister Lincoln has raised his stove pipe hat and seven feet in the air

three rich red blossoms start to open against the blue of the sky.

Callie sits on the stump of the pussy willow tree that was taking over the garden,

looking through the cutch grass that grows just outside our fence. -

probably not as frustrated as I am inclined to be -

too interested in the neighbourhood kitties that wander down the lane.

The sedum and the chrysanthemums are saving themselves for October, when

the trees turn golden and scarlet and bronze

and the sky a brilliant blue.

Soon, soon, soon I must take a trip to Cawston and to Ginty's pond...

Maybe tomorrow!

The Loon

ABC Wednesday
September 28th, 2016

The letter is L for Loon

The Loon

Not quite four a.m. when the rapture of being alive

strikes me from sleep, and I rise

from the comfortable bed and go

to another room, where my books are lined up

in their neat and colourful rows.  How

magical they are!  I choose one

and open it.  Soon

I have wandered in over the waves of the words

to the temple of thought.

And then I hear

outside, over the actual waves, the small,

perfect voice of the loon.  He is also awake,

and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out to the fading moon, to the pink flush

swelling in the east that, soon,

will become the long, reasonable day.

Inside the house

it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight

in which I am sitting.

I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

Mary Oliver

or this......

The Loon on Oak-Head Pond

cries for three days, in the gray mist

cries for the north that it hopes it can find

plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel,

blinks its red eye

cries again

you come every afternoon and wait to hear it,

you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,

in the silence that follows,

as though it were your own twilight, 

as though it were your own vanishing song.

Mary Oliver,  (again)

For more great Ls visit here at ABC Wednesday

with thanks to Roger, Denise, Leslie

and their lovely helpers.