FALL FEVER DEFINED

6:50 AM

7:30 AM

"There should be more Fall vacations or, at the least, more Fall week ends.  The world is a wonderful place when the heat of Summer is past, the winds are not yet edged with frost, and Winter still lies a comfortable distance ahead.  Summer’s dust and litter have been washed and blown away, the woodlands are full of wine and gold, and the whole land is at its colorful best.

Once you get out in the open, these Fall days, there is a sense of leisure without lassitude. Spring is all eagerness, Summer is hot laziness or sweaty haste; but Autumn is achievement and a measure of contentment.  Autumn is a time when hills wait for climbing, when answers to half-realized questions lie in the thin haze on the horizon.  That, at least, is the feeling of Fall.  Spring fever makes one wish to lie in the meadow and wait for the answers to seek him out; but Fall fever make one wish to go and find the answers.

Adam ate the apple at this time of year, and this was the season when man first discovered the potentialities in a ripe grape.  Things come to fulfillment now.  Fledglings are ready to migrate.  Young foxes bark in the dusk.  Last Spring’s fawns come into old orchards to pick and choose among the windfalls.  Even the winds are restless.

For the footloose, Fall is the time when one must go.  Where?  Almost anywhere, on a bright day.  A migrant farmhand summed it up when he said, “Every Summer I decide to pick one place and settle down.  Then it comes Fall, and I can’t seem to stay where I am.  If Fall would just skip a year, maybe I could make up my mind.  But Fall never skips. 

Sun Sets Are Unspectacular

How apt today's entry from SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS.  I, too, want 'to go,' where I am not sure, whether it's the delights of Budapest (where my friend Hasan now lives), the shores of Lake Ontario, the Thousand Islands, the Blue Ridge Highway, the backroads of Vermont or Maine, or nearby, The Enchanted Mountains of Cattaragus County,  I am itching to go.  It's not that I am unhappy here on the lake but I did not name my blog Wanderlust for no reason.  Far off places, even near by places, attract me like bees to flowers.  

I have decided to post at least one dawn photo each morning, for the next few weeks till we take off for our trip East, to see how the mornings change as the fall season begins as well as wanes.  They have been spectacular so far, but I am not so sure what cloudy or rainy mornings will be like, other than just gray.