::::setting on the porch step......steaming mug held easy in two hands which are propped between his spread knees........gazing out over the western ridges as the last of the sun flees a flushed sky......spoken as a soft caress:::: She comes.........I felt her in the chill shrouded foggy morns.....::::slipping on a flannel to start the day:::::....and heard her in the voice and the sounds that chorus their way through my days. Dark-thirty comes sooner now and the garden browns as much from the season as from the heat and drought. The small creatures scurry.........not with the burst of spring cavorting but in what now seems a more jerky frantic motion as they make preparations for the small death of winter.

She'll emerge soon enough from her summer home on the tops of the mountain, trailing her train of brilliant reds and yellows, burnt orange and burgundy, older now than when she climbed those same mountains clothed in spring. She'll cover the hillsides in her skirts of color, leaving behind stark bare branches, as she slowly makes her way across the land to her watery winter home. Under the waves of the sea she will rest and be renewed.

Autumn comes lightly whispering for now...........but she comes.

Joe:::::feeling the wistful melancholy of the season in his bones::::::