Welcome to my World

Welcome to the domain different--to paraphrase from New Mexico's capital city of Santa Fe which bills itself "The City Different." Perhaps this space is not completely unique but my world shapes what I write as well as many other facets of my life. The four Ds figure prominently but there are many other things as well. Here you will learn what makes me tick, what thrills and inspires me, experiences that impact my life and many other antidotes, vignettes and journal notes that set the paradigm for Dierdre O'Dare and her alter ego Gwynn Morgan and the fiction and poetry they write. I sell nothing here--just share with friends and others who may wander in. There will be pictures, poems, observations, rants on occasion and sometimes even jokes. Welcome to our world!

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Seasons Change

With amazing abruptness in many places, but the southwest desert is particularly prone to this. One day it is wet, the monsoon effect still in full possession. Twenty four hours later the humidity has dropped from about 60% to 16%, the sky is cloudless and the wind carries a completely different texture and flavor. Right on schedule with the autumn equinox, we got a change of season! I was ready. Oh, I miss the comfort of moist skin but beyond that, fall is my season and I have loved it most of my life. In Arizona and New Mexico is is just such a wonderful time.

However in the final evening of the summer pattern, we had an amazing sunset with some beautiful clouds and of course I got pictures. It really looked like reflections from an actual fire to me! Here are a few of my favorites from that evening, ending with a sly eye peeking through a dark cloud at me. Enjoy!




.

Friday, September 20, 2013

I finally found it--a long sought verse!

Many years ago, a special pen-pal from my youth with whom I once imagined myself to be in love, sent me a page ripped from an old poetry book with a stanza circled. Already I was starting to believe in reincarnation and this bit of verse encouraged such belief. But I never could find the author or the whole poem.

 Then going through some old, old papers and souvenirs yesterday, I came across that brown and tattered page. On an impulse I keyed in a line to a search engine... Lo and behold, the whole thing was at my fingertips in a minute! The wonders of the internet! After decades it is finally whole and real! Here it is.

The stanza bracketed in two asterisks is the one my friend had circled. He is actually the first one to have his own chapter in Walking Down My Shadows although we never met face to face. Without a doubt he did influence me quite a lot. And this bit of verse was a major part of that influence. But isn't this just an amazing bit of verbage?? The gentleman knew his geology and prehistory anyway!! But he was also a romanticist. I like that. It gives me shivers to read the whole thing at last. So thank you Jose Cazador--you've not met him yet either <smile> but soon.... The next chapter of my checkered romantic life is due soon.

EVOLUTION  (I would call it something else but it is not mine to name!!)
            By Langdon Smith

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip 
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet,
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And, oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled 
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded bone
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.

I carved the fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush were gone.

**And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet - **

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.
- Langdon Smith.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Shingles and Seaplanes

And I might have added 'sideways to the sun' but that would be too long for a title!

Shingles--I did not think one could get them if you hadn't had chicken pox. My mistake. Per the doctor I saw, exposure is enough for the virus to live in your body and that I did have for sure as my brother had them twice, the second time as an adult and a severe case. Moral of story--get that shot!! Oh well. I was able to get diagnosed fast and on the anti-viral meds so I am feeling better already after starting to sense something was wrong on Sunday.

The main connection here is that being under the weather had me reading a lot more than usual. I normally read a bit in bed after the news before I get super-sleepy but when I could not concentrate on any projects or feel like doing much, I could lose myself --and my discomfort--in a book. One I chose was Richard Bach's (Jonathan Livingston Seagull etc.) title One. It was recommended to me by a dear friend who is very spiritual and into the Celtic ways and although Bach is not, some of his ideas meld well. This book for sure! Bach is a very strong "peacenik" (and I do not mean that in any derogatory manner as I grow more-so with age despite or maybe because of being a patriot) and a vegetarian (which I am definitely not though if I killed something to eat as I did when younger  I thanked its spirit and the Great Spirit for its life and service to me and mine as food) but he certainly can write a powerful book and get one to thinking.

In One he and his soul-mate spouse take a strange journey with the seaplane they are flying to attend a conference. Of course Bach is a long-term pilot and I have always wanted to learn to fly and do have some friends who did so that aspect of much of his work also appeals. Anyway they find themselves in Other places--I use the Other for other here to indicate a real otherness and not simply other countries or even other planets etc.--and meeting Other versions of themselves and in some cases trying to influence them in a positive way. So meld time travel with Journey of Souls and a few other ideas and you have One. I finished it and breathed out a sigh of, "Wow, what a wonderful journey!" But could not stop there...

Today as I got ready to take Ginger for a walk--we had missed two days with my feeling so bad--I thought about patterns and doorways to that Other. One does not need a seaplane, I think, but each of us could find the proper vehicle to make such a journey since it is mental/metaphysical/spiritual and not a regular trip at all. I have long thought that the Celtic knotwork patterns are a representation of life(lives?) with all the twists and turns and coming back to the same place at a different time or the same time at a different place, all those non-coincidences and serendipity things we experience etc. So what if one walks--in mind and meditation --a labyrinth of a Celtic pattern just to see where it takes you? Or maybe just take a step or two 'sideways to the sun', which was a phrase the old Celts used for widdershins with an intent  to get across that invisible wall to Lord Dunsany's "beyond the fields we know" where magic and faerie and Otherness is found??

Patterns fascinate me and I am often exploring them in one way or another. Why? Where? Who? What? When? Not the old journalistic five w's but a different and incredible new array of questions, most of the answers for which are probably not within reach in the here and now but somewhere and somewhen--I do intend to know and trust that I shall.


Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Lest we forget...

Twelve years ago today we suffered a shocking horrific jolt that made most of us rethink our security and inviolability here in our sheltered homeland. Although some of the unity and sense of purpose that grew out of those awful events has faded with time, I do think our country is stronger for having survived and moved on. We may have gone overboard in a few areas in the name of security--the TSA and some of the potential abuses of various agencies and departments of the government but perhaps some of this is a genuine trade-off. Terrorism in many forms is likely to plague us for a long time. I'm not sure it can be stamped out totally but we do need to unite and work toward that ultimate goal.


At any rate, September 11, 2001 is a newer Day of Infamy that will stand alongside Pearl Harbor Day as a tragic and I think undeserved attack on our people and territory. I cannot quite remember December 7, 1941 for I was not born yet but I've heard enough about it and studied enough history to feel a visceral shock at what happened. The USS Arizona still lies in the blue waters and since Arizona is my adopted home state. that carries a special significance for me. I did not know anyone personally who died on 9-11 but there were some names I recognized and my heart still hurts for those who lost friends and loved ones.

I think it is wonderful though that the day has been given new and more positive meaning as a Day of Service where millions are taking time to do at least one special good deed or act of service on this day. If we can turn an ill wind to some good, that is a positive step. So let's add it to our calendars along with Earth Day, Make A Difference Day and a few others that we observe with good works. There cannot be too many such so long as we do not become inured to the idea of giving and service. In that way we can say that the three thousand and some did not die in vain and demonstrate that we are not cowed, subdued or intimidated by the acts of a few warped and dangerous people who had no shame or human kindness when they caused so many innocent lives to be lost.

BTW the photo above is mine and was taken in Jerome, AZ in June of this year on my reunion trip. That is of course the US flag and beneath it the flag of the state of Arizona. I cannot see them flying in the blue sky without tearing up a little bit. I am not ashamed to be patriotic!

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Walkin' in the Rain

I was not going to go this morning but Ginger loves her walks soooo much. So I grabbed an umbrella instead of my usual hiking stick and we went. It was just a gentle drizzly rain and really kind of nice. In the Navajo tradition, the gentle drizzly winter type rains are female while the hard pounding summer rains are male. I do see some logic in that--aren't the males of most species more on the wind and thunder and power side? ;-)

Anyway I was reminded of a couple of songs--one none of you will remember unless you're about as old as dirt like I am. The artist was Johnny Ray and he always sang kind of sad, heartachey ones. "Just walking in the rain, thinking how we met. Torturing my heart, trying to forget..." Not really torture but I do recall a lot in this kind of rain. The other song is a bit of a classic, "September in the Rain." It takes me back to a long ago summer or early fall. There were several times when I was going out to a place where we kept part of the variable herd of critters. Probably riding a big old mule I used a lot that we called "Prez" and my dear Dusty came to join me. You have not ":met" him yet here but you will.  We walked for a bit as carrying double would have been a bit iffy for Prez at that point, as he was still in training. And it was raining, off and on, one of those transition type weather days between summer and fall.  Here is a shot of Dusty on Prez on one of those days when I guess I had two mounts with me.

Dusty and I were both wearing cheap straw hats. They were probably made of palm fiber and came up from south of the border. In the politically incorrect vernacular of those days they were known as "Mexican Stetsons" or "Mormon Stetsons" (no slur or ethnic rudeness intended using those terms now!) and we were joking that they might melt. Actually that was unlikely as they were really pretty sturdy. I had a number of them over the years and was wearing one in that photo with Charley Bryant a couple of posts back-- More Equines.

We walked along for a mile or so in the sandy bottoms of the Verde River, on the east and south of Tuzigoot National Monument (a prehistoric Native American site) with arms around each other's waists and me leading Prex by his reins. At that point we'd been friends for about a year and were just edging into a deeper relationship. We laughed that, "every time we kissed the sun came out," although it may have been the other way in reality. Anyway, there were several similar afternoons that September and the song always brings them to mind even to this day. Fond, gentle sort of memories, only mildly bittersweet now, so many years later.

So today Ginger and I walked in the misty cool morning. I hummed both tunes and found the rather novel weather pleasant although I am not a 'water' person at all. Taurus is a very earthish sign and terra firma of the dry variety is definitely my preferred milieu!


Sunday, September 8, 2013

More looking back--school days

After four years at the two room/one room school in Bridgeport, that school was also closed so for eighth grade, I went to a 'normal' or more typical school. In Clarkdale, Arizona, it was still not a really big school. There were three schools in town. The grammar school where my brother Charlie began first grade that same year served grades K-3, I believe. They had a kind of middle school which encompassed grades 4-6 and the seventh and eighth grades were in with the high school which was where I found myself that fall.

Talk about culture shock! I went from a one-teacher school of about thirty pupils in eight grades to a program where we rotated from classroom to classroom with different teachers for each subject, just as the high school did. There were only eight girls in my class and almost twice as many boys but that did not make me an instant queen of the campus! I missed the country and community atmosphere and my old crush, Marvin. However by the time I moved on to my freshman year at the same school, I had adjusted fairly well. By then my admittedly fickle fancy had found a couple of new boys to be interested in. Again, as I look back, I have to laugh but as is often the case with puppy love, it seemed very serious and intense at the time. Both boys were a bit on the outside of the "in crowd" or popular groups, just as I was, not athletes or BMOCs at all..

They suffered some bullying at times, mostly verbal, over which  I was very quick to jump to their defense. However, that was often thankless too. I mean it was probably a bit demeaning to a young man to have a girl leap to berate his tormentors! Live and learn. I never did have good sense when it came to what I perceived as injustice and wrong. Although I was normally very timid, I could jump up and let someone have it with both barrels when I felt the urge in defense of someone wronged or a collective wrong. I can recall people looking at me with shock and surprise when I would do that. Whoa, is that mousy little Gaye/ Maggie/
Margaret (I was known at various times by all those names) shooting off hard words like blasts of gunfire? No profanity at that time but plenty of blistering phrases!


Anyway here from my old yearbook are my two heroes and special friends from that time. I guess I did not pick them for their handsome faces or athletic or other prowess. Mostly they were nice though and just people I felt sympathy for, a bit of common ground and a connection with. I suppose one could have worse reasons for a crush or puppy love! Both moved on out of my life by the next year but that's the way of such things.

By the next year, the high schools of Cottonwood and Clarkdale were merged to form Mingus High School. And my original hero Marvin was back in my world, now a senior and about 6'2" with a bit of the ornery and swaggering rebel about him. His father was gone and he basically went his own way. We never got together but not due to my lack of wishing! All of this was duly recorded in verse and in my diary, the poems the first of what eventually became Walking Down My Shadows  although I did not know it at that time. And the would-be writer of romance added more fodder to the memories and learning process.

Friday, September 6, 2013

More equines

Back in the old days--you know the stories--we walked five miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways and so on. But my stories involve some outlaw mules and wild horses, a couple of old cowboys from whom I learned a great deal and about ten years of wonderful and terrible times with probably at least a hundred different horses, mules and burros (donkeys if you prefer) that passed through my life. Mainly my father and I, after he stopped being a school teacher, were in the process of starting a business to raise and train horses and mules, mostly for trail riding but also spreading out a bit into purebreds of Quarter Horse or Appaloosa bloodlines.

Such an operation takes time and money and a heck of a lot of work, even more if you are building on sweat equity. In the second half of that decade, dad's health, both physical and mental, began to decline with disastrous results especially on the financial end. In the end all was lost. It was heart breaking and having invested so much in the endeavor, I was devastated. I finally sold the last few horses myself after dad was in the hospital for an extended period and my mother and two younger brothers went to stay with relatives. But that is getting ahead of myself a bit.

Last horse post I made was about Tina, my beloved mare that was the first horse to be really mine. An old cowboy friend of ours, Charley Bryant was a connoisseur of cowponies and good working horses. He thought very highly of Tina which meant a lot to me. He had a horse called Stormy that was his paradigm and epitome of good horse but Tina was right in there with Stormy.

She was about eight before we bred her. By that time we had acquired a nice Appaloosa stallion named Yavapai Chief. We always suspected he had been stolen and was re-registered as his ancestry was not recorded. At that time a horse could be registered in the Appaloosa breed simply on having the color which he did--a nice chestnut with a blanket and the typical traits of white-rimmed eyes and one or more striped hooves. He also had a very odd brand that I could never trace although I wrote to the state brand offices all over the west. At any rate, we bred Tina with him and she produced two fine colts.

 To the left is a shot of me with Mr Bryant when I was about sixteen. He was a big man, around 6'2" or so and probably the finest cowboy-style horseman I ever knew  Then the next shot is of Yavapai Chief. I have a color shot of him but have not scanned it yet. He was a handsome horse but fairly tractable for a stallion and I rode him quite a bit once I had convinced my dad that I could!

Bravo, Tina's first foal, was almost the image of her. He arrived on March 18, 1964. The second colt, who I named Rico, was a sorrel like his sire but he had not acquired spots when he was sold as a long yearling late in 1966.. He did have the other appy traits though. He was born on my birthday in 1965, April 27. He was a big colt and I think she carried him a couple of weeks long. At any rate, he took a lot out of his mother. We nursed her along with blood worms, foaling fever and some other problems. She never really got her strength and health back and went to the Rainbow Bridge the next spring as I previously said. However both the colts went to a big working ranch in western Yavapai County and became find cow ponies. I was proud of them both but had wished for a filly to carry on with Tina's fine traits. But that was not to be and when things went down the loo, so to speak, I was glad not to have to lose such a mare. It would have finished breaking my heart!

And here are pictures of Bravo (left) and Rico (right)  when they were wee colts--there is nothing quite as precious as a new baby horse, all stilty legs and that little tail like a rumpled feather, still not straight from being curled up inside mom for some ten months as they grew. Tina was such a good mother but trusted me with her babies from the first day. Some mares are pretty spooky and even a bit mean but she never was. I can't wait to see her again there at the Rainbow Bridge pastures! Excuse the quality of the horse photos. They were taking with a little Kodak "Brownie" box camera, my first, and you could make no adjustments for the light etc. I still thank all the Powers that I have these to remember, though!

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Older but no wiser--how true

Last night I was reading in my old journals and came across the following passage. At the time I was near the end of my work towards my bachelor's degree, apart and somewhat estranged from my family, and had seen a number of dreams and projects in which I had invested, quite literally, blood, sweat and tears fall to total ruin. I'd had to move on from one of my most intense relationships, actually the first real adult love affair, and had tentatively begun another that also was not destined to a happy ending. My future was very unclear at that moment. And I was very much alone.

It may seem a little maudlin or over-blown now but reading it over, I can still see me as I am today, decades later. It is a bit of a jolt that I do. Ah well, very few writers of any note have been happy, balanced and well-adjusted people, it seems! Tragedy and melancholy and taking one's self too seriously at times is a common thread. At least now I can usually laugh a bit at all of the drama! So this is the person who became a writer of romance...not so odd, that. I lived in an apartment in this house at that time. If memory serves, it was a bit shabbier then, a block from the main line railroad track in Flagstaff, AZ. I took this picture when I was in Arizona for the reunion in June. Changes and sameness...

On this, the eve of my twenty-sixth birthday, I begin a new journal, diary and collection of my wandering prose and poesy. How many pages I have filled with how much nonsense since May 1, 1955 when I first began to record my life! How many triumphs and tears and dull, dull days have come and passed and been recorded. How many names have appeared in how many paper dreams? At that instant, they seemed so important and now they are faded like flowers in the sun to a meaningless dust. Bits and fragments live, I guess, and even shape my present dreams, even as do the dark shadows of past sufferings and sorrows.
Were that the name now in my heart could stay. I think only one has been closer and meant as much. And he, as I have said before, is as if dead and buried now. My time with him might as well have been in another life. So much I’d undo if I only could, yet it has all strengthened and shaped me into what I am now, whatever good is in me now.  I’ve  no illusions about myself; I learned more from experience and example than from doctrine and lecture. The flaws of the parents are magnified and the virtues miniaturized, I guess. I am not noble or good or great; I know it and I am sorry. At times I rationalize and attempt to justify but in my soul I bow a humble head and measure myself with blunt and bitter honesty. I fall far short of what I should be, would like to be. Perhaps I’m not even strong and great enough to be truly bad!
There is always a little awe in starting a new book, a desire for a crystal ball or powers of clairvoyance to see over the wall into the future. Where I will be tomorrow, many tomorrows, I can only wonder.  My suffering and sorrow is not over. That the stars tell me and my soul knows. Like Angelique (heroine in a series of novels I had read) I am destined to love fiercely and search, reach, strive, cry. I am to know the weary miles of many a lonely road in search of an often vague dream.
 I think perhaps this time I have found him, although I have thought so before and been very wrong. The bits and pieces of the dream that has lived in the pages I have filled for fourteen years seem to have been incarnated, unified and housed in…(this person). The impossible barrier between us only intensifies and distils the bittersweet clarity and beauty of my feelings. What a hopelessly incurable and impractical romanticist, idealist and dreamer I am–still. For all the scars, the seeming changes, I am not so different from that twelve year old. “Older, but no wiser, for in my heart the dreams are still the same…”
Oh, I do not want to marry Marvin K or Casey Tibbs now, but I still write, still live more in my dreams than in reality and still cannot cope with life as it is. I still want security and appreciation and am still torn between proud and lofty aspirations, old and shackling loyalties, and a fear and lack of confidence. At twelve I was just on the first edge of awakening and discontent. Am I now just on the last edge or in the center? I think perhaps I’ll never grow up because somehow I stepped abruptly from childhood to adulthood—in death and violence and lust. The missing links can’t be retrieved now but there is a break, a flaw, in the continuity of my existence, my life and growth. Thus I stand on the eve of my twenty sixth birthday, alone…

It's here!

Or actually they are here--Hummingbird Summer and that First of Fall Day!! I am soooo ready!

This morning I sat out on my covered patio with my morning coffee and watched at least a half dozen of the flying jewels swirl around my two feeders and zip back and forth, engaging in dogfights to put The Red Baron to shame and twittering in agitated excitement. If there was to be a collective noun for Hummers, like gaggle of geese and murder of crows, it would be a whirl, swirl or a twirl of hummingbirds! I do so love to watch and hear them.

I do not think I have scanned it yet but I have a picture of a little one perched on the barb-wire fence behind my home in Whetstone, AZ about twenty years ago or so. I was quite worried about it for it was later in the fall and the tiny creature perched there for close to twenty four hours. Oh pooh, I will just go get that out of an album and scan it right now! Anyway, not long afterwards, I read in a book about them that my hubby gave me that this was a normal thing. They tend to pause in the southward migration at the edge of the 'winter' country for a time. That's hummingbird summer. And when they feel the colder weather pushing close, they eat all they can, go into a somnolent state while they digest that into energy that is stored, wake up to feed again and then head out for the longest leg of their journey. They take off at a steep angle and get as high as they can go and then slowly, ever so slowly, descend as they forge on south. Most winter in southern Mexico or even farther into Central and even South America. Think of the millions of wing-beats that such a journey requires. I admire them so much for they are fearless, determined, persistent and beautiful, all in one amazing little package! I honor them with my 'spiritual' (Druid and Native American) name of Wind Dancer, which is what some of the native tribes call them. And indeed they do dance on the air! So here are two pix and yes, I was that close. I used the diopter lens (micro photog) on my camera! I think this is a young black-chin.


The wind has shifted and become drier. Already my skin feels it and I do miss the silky feeling of the humidity but still welcome the change. The quality of the sunlight has changed the last few days as well, assuming the golden and softer feeling of fall. The days have shortened perceptibly now and it is easier to get up before the sun although I didn't make it this morning. I worked a lot yesterday and was just a bit tired and lazy today.
Had to take Ginger and Rojito in for their heart worm shots--they were both angels and I was so proud of them!--so that and this blog are about my main efforts for the day. I'm still not used to kind of rationing my energy and taking a lazy day after a harder one but I'm learning.

September is still  my favorite month with October a close second. More on that later, maybe next time.A lot of events that impacted my life have happened in these months so many memories, most good and a few rather sad but that is how life is!

A verse for the season:

    Autumn at Huachuca
                                                                                                                            
Slowly summer fades to fall.                        
In little changes after all                                                                                  
Comes age or death or fall of night.                                        
Only if you tune your sight                                                                          
And other senses can you tell.                                                            
Nature keeps her secrets well,                                                                               
But there are many subtle clues                                                                            
Appearing now to break the news.    
Summer slowly slips away,                                   
Bit by bit and day by day—
 A hint of coolness in the air,
Leaves gone dusty everywhere.                                       
Clouds remain, but not the same                                                       
Even birds have changed their game,                                      
Now in flocks instead of pairs,                                       
Singing different, sadder airs.                                        
                       GMW, © 1992