Ode to the End of Fall

Bright berries

Technically, it's still fall in the Northern Hemisphere. (Winter officially commences on December 21.) The other day, I was out walking in my neighborhood for exercise. In the span of an hour and a half, I managed to snap 85 photos. It's a sickness, I know. I need help.

Dried hydrangea through a fence

Today's pictures are just four of those 85 and are my ode to the end of fall. What struck me most was, even in death and decay as we find at the end of the autumnal equinox, there is beauty. To quote John Donne, "No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace/ as I have seen in one autumnal face."

Through bare trees...

Or, as Lisa Lindsey penned in her poem, Bare Trees, "Through bare trees/ I can be winter's innocence,/ unashamed needfulness,/ the thin and reaching limbs/ of a beggar, longing to touch/ but the hem of the sun."

Lingering roses touched by fall

But none sum up autumn quite as well as the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, who wrote in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Photo copyright: D.C. Confidential, 12/08