Fall is celebrated by so many poets and writers. Quotes abound. For the next many Mondays expect a Nature Meditation featuring one of these beautiful quotes. If you’d like to add your comments, including the thoughts these words inspire, please do.

“He loved the hills in the spring when the snows go off and the first flowers come. He loved the warm sun of summer and the high mountain meadows, the trails through the timber and the sudden clear blue of the lakes. Best of all he loved the fall, with the tawny, and gray, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods and above the hills the high blue windless skies.” Ernest Hemingway, Graveside Eulogy for his hungting friend Gene Van Guilder, Sun Valley, Idaho, Nov. 3, 1939.

I’m right there, feeling what Hemingway felt when he thought of this dear friend whom he had just lost. ‘Best of all he loved the fall…’

Why exactly do I love the fall?

• Cool breezes promise that the extreme heat of summer is over.


• Cooler nights bring restful sleep.


• Sunlight is different – lower in the sky. 


• The sun shines from such an angle that colors seem to vibrate and become truer.


• The air is full of energy, inspiring squirrels to hunt for nuts to stash, and people to gather their final garden harvest.


• Mushrooms pop up in unexpected places.


• Morning fog blankets the valleys and hovers over the streams and lakes.


• The colors of fall, rust and orange and yellow and brown, fill store windows and clothes closets.


• Morning coffee and cocoa take the chill off my seat on the porch swing at 7 a.m.


• The dogs are frisky again.