The gentle music of September lingers on and the magic wand of the conductor casts a spell over we who wish to experience it.
Rustling leaves, swinging branches and the swaying treetops compose a special kind of symphony.
The wind blows around us and we sense the seasonal change. The air is somehow different and feels a little colder. In brief moments the wind is still- it is soundless as only the woodlands can be.
There is an enchantment to this fairy land world as we
wander-talk through and among woodlands, fields and meadows.
Precious pigments seem to come from nowhere and everywhere; ground, water and sky, materializing in the red-orange of sumac, the orange delicacy of touch-me-nots, in the golden yellow of aspen, ash, tulip, and sassafras trees, in the greens of a hundred lingering kinds, and the whispering blue-lavender of so many asters.
Now is the time to lay back to see the world upside down while showers of pale yellow evergreen needles flutter to the ground. It is a time to jump in piles of leaves and roll down a grassy hillside, to be burgundy deep in blueberry bushes, hip high in multicolored ferns and grasses under sugar maple golden yellows, red and orange.
With every glance, every step, every turn the glow of goldenrod is the pot at the end of September’s rainbow.
Copyright © 1988, 1999 Barbara A. Smith and John G. Hipps. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published September 28, 1988 in the Free-Press Courier, Westfield, Pennsylvania.