In A Dozen Weeks the Leaves Will Turn and Fall

This afternoon I was thinking about how delightful it is to feel the summer breeze blowing through the open windows and stirring the trees outside.

I don’t want to be an agent of doom and depression, but in just a dozen weeks the leaves now just darkening will turn and fall. The balmy air will cool and the days will shorten.

Robert Frost, the New England poet, observed this with sadness and captures the melancholy of it in this poem about taking an autumn walk…

When I go up through the mowing field,

The headless aftermath,

Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,

Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,

The whir of sober birds

Up from the tangle of withered weeds

Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,

But a leaf that lingered brown,

Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,

Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth

By picking the faded blue

Of the last remaining aster flower

To carry again to you.

-Robert Frost