From spring flowers to fall decor

 This is my favorite fall decoration. This happy scarecrow, displayed on our front door, greets visitors. 

Today was the perfect day to hang my little friend, as the weather has just broken from highs in the high 90s and 100 some days...all summer it seems. 

Today it is in the 70s and the doors and windows are flung open. The outdoor air feels like a carress.

Bird chatter and passing cars sound amplified. The cat dashes to the door to see what he heard rustling in the bushes outside. 

Fall has arrived. Tomorrow I will settle on the patio and catch up on my reading.

Hope you are enjoying cooler weather and the changing seasons. I will soon replace the pink florals of spring with the rusts, oranges, and golds of fall. Our pink roses are having one last hurrah.

Hope you enjoy an autumn poem I had published years ago in Quivre River Anthology about my best long distance (now late) friend of 47 years. 

 

Hitching a Ride on a Song

 Bacon sizzles on wisps of wood smoke and weaves through autumn leaves in hues so bright it makes me squint. 

Outside my best friend’s cabin, I watch the morning sun scorch the surface of Newfound Lake and ignite the tree-tops as a breeze dumps treasures at my feet like contraband from a bad boy’s pockets

Enthralled at the frisky fall foliage, I set my coffee mug down and imagine slurping cherry Kool-aid out of the red sugar maples,swallowing the butterscotch nectar of yellow elms, sucking fire-orange extract from burnished oaks,and tinting my tongue with evergreen elixir.

I guzzle a gallon of happiness; in one sweet swill I devour my morning blend. Loons in love stir the stillness as my dear friend wanders onto the porch searching for me and her short term memory.

She hovers over my shoulder. I silently curse her brain cancer. She raises her voice, lowers her head, draws her robe tightly and belts out an old Janis Joplin song from our youth.

 “Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz…”  Our voices blend, peal over the New Hampshire White Mountains, tumble down a lush meadow
quiver on a stream, bottom out in
a valley and echo through the woods –
a timeless melody hitchhikes on her long-term memory, and for a moment we are vibrant, young, climbing mountains, swimming seas, rocking babies, traipsing across tundra as we did when we met as next door neighbors in Alaska. Sheila and me.