Autumnal Gazing

Ever since my days as a boy in North Sanford, NY, I have been deeply appreciative of the Autumn season.  I love the colors in the forest - red, yellow, orange, pink, green - all mixed together in a chaotic jumble of exquisite beauty.  I love the warm sun on my face and arms, the heat seeping through the fabric of sweater, shirt, or jacket.  I love the chill of cool to cold northern breezes, raising "goosebumps" on my skin as the sun settles in the west and the earth's heat radiates back through the deepening blue of the sky into the black of starlit space.

Here, in Southern Illinois, our autumn scenery is what I would call "very pretty," but it lacks the crispness of mountain flora and atmosphere.  The warm days are more summer-like than I prefer, although I have grown used to them over the last thirty years of living here.  The black nights are not as black, since the population density here is much higher than it is in upsate New York, and every farm has an array of spotlights and security lights, and floodlights - as if the people are frightened of the dark.  If you read the papers and talk to people, you will learn that in the twenty-first century of the Common Era, fear of night is returning - which today is not fear of wild animal or savage Indian, but fear of neighbor or of neighbor's kin.  I suspect that this is also more true than I would want in Broome and Delaware Counties of New York, as well.  It does not speak well of us as a species.

Today the newspaper carried a story that this fall will be rather bland.  There have been "spot droughts," you see.  A  fungus has infected the trees and a wasp infestation has resulted in the tree leaves being attacked by insect larva - I have seen the galls on the leaf bottoms, myself.  All of this has affected the ability of the tree to produce the appropriate amount of sugar during the growing season and that will affect the ability of the leaves to show forth their most brilliant colors.  Good fall color will be, they say, a rather hit or miss affair.

Meanwhile we are in the middle of a political drought of sorts.  As one writer put it, we have the specter of "two bankrupt political parties, busy bankrupting the country."  The country seems to be infected with a swarm of money wasps, attacking the political system, implanting the multitude of growing parts with galls of money, bringing productive governance to a halt - all to feed their own greed.  The American political system is currently for sale.  Good fall color will be, they say, a rather hit or miss affair.