In just a few days, we go into our final quarter of 2023, the year’s final ninety days. Of course, at the end of each year, people ask themselves whether they have had a good year of it, how it all went. 

Well, Dear Reader, the marathon is approaching its finish line and what is it? There it is, full in sight, that line, perpendicular to your path, foursquare a quarter mile ahead. How daunting. 

It’s true: still 90 days, a quarter year, much precious time, thousands of hours, to make amends, to sew it all up, to make a better and final year of that SOMETHING BIG you and I have been wishing for. If you pay attention now, in the forests around us, green branches are overnight erupting orange on the bow. To their very tips, orange! 

We remember in melancholy the dry drab dead grass days of March, the nodding daffodils of May, the deep bore green of the forest in July. All this has now come and gone. Now it is September, November.

Single branches erupt in orange. There is time ahead to finish this job, your or my job, or any job. We can do what we said we would do, or not. Who’s really counting? Hell, you and I are. 

We can go dry drab grass on ourselves or erupt in great color right out to the tips. We can run the race or decline to run the race. But if you have run any race, and even come in second or fifth or twelfth, you know: just crossing that finish line is eruption in orange.

Fall is my favorite season because it is a season of melancholia, of color, of color and articulation and therefore of poetry. Another deep bore summer, broken down, come and gone! 

Where did it all go? All the children’s laughter, that splashing in the water, the fireworks over the black welling lake, the rainbow sprinkles on the ice cream! Where did all the hours go, how did these things ever melt away into nothing? 

Our children arise and they leave us, they leave us more than shadows, and in their necessary leaving they remind us of our age and bodily pain and they remind us of our own leaving from home so many years ago as upright fragrant buds of hope. 

Oh friends this is September, it’s downright November. You and I are leaves. Somehow we always knew this but it’s not so easy as we once thought. 

It is not easy but nonetheless there’s jangling change in the pocket and ninety days and thousands of hours to go. All of us we can choose to go dry drab Marchgrass or we can erupt to our tips in orange. 

The choice is foursquare ours. Whatever you do and however you do it: seek peace and laughter, seek splashing water and fireworks. For God’s sake, Reader, do no harm! Winter’s oval shadow is upon us now and those Northern snow gods, from afar, are drumming hard.

 Do you hear them, too? Hour by hour, day and night, orange leaves are falling. Who else smells snow? Ahead: a finish line. See you there!