Au revoir Summer, Welcome Autumn #phenology

Are you enjoying Summer's last full day this year? Locally, the Autumnal Equinox occurs at 9:21 am tomorrow (numerologists may make something of 9/21 : 9/22). Our current and anticipated weather is very unSummerish: cool, cloudy, damp, with wet expected. We're under a Flash Flood Watch until some time tomorrow. According to our MNDOT, the earliest recorded snow was 9/26/42. That doesn't match what WikiPedia and Mark Seeley's Weather Almanac tell us, but we're already well past the end of August. Leaf colors keep increasing, but there's no sign yet of tamaracks turning golden. Stay tuned.

Autumn's splashes of colors

Photo by J. Harrington

End of Summer

By Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

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