Photo posts of autumn color (and free Kindle books!)

*Josiah’s Apple Orchard, MG novel, will be FREE Kindle Oct. 16-21.*

*The House in Windward Leaves, Halloween-time fantasy, will be FREE Kindle from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2*

An enchanted entrance

My one-act play, “The Lawn Auction” is published in Mused Literary Review’s Fall Equinox issue.   The journal is part of BellaOnline, a much-visited site for women and their concerns.  I've read the whole issue and found poems, fiction, and nonfiction that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Wide Awake Loons is being re-published.

The Lake Superior shore region is known for its fall color.  When I was growing up in Southern Minnesota, our next door neighbors took a trip up to Duluth every fall just to see the trees turning color.   We were in school and never could take that in.  Since moving to Duluth, I have marveled at Indian summer here.  I take pictures every year, and admire trees from my windows that are just plain breath-taking.  This year, I’m putting pictures in this blog post. 

Decoration for the evergreen

 

The boulevard trees arching are scheduled to be removed for blocks due to road & sewer pipe improvement.

 

Mountain ash

The yellow leaf road

My new banner at Facebook

When I lived in Minneapolis, I wrote this poem.  It was published in Rio Number 14 in 2004, online.

On a day when a maple leaf

is really a flower

Last walk in harpstring hues
tousled by the yellowing
palms of trees.  This day was
borrowed from August.

In other chameleon trees, fire
supplies mood but not the balm.
I gasp too at fall’s rude turmoil,
at petals imploding like dresses
exposing crooked legs.  Some
bloom backwards, stuck on a
perverse carousel around houses,
papery-soft like widows with tissues.
Squashed are most.  Appallingly
their mauves are trampled.
Striped petunias put up a
frilled front, looking less ruined.

I pass a huge sidewalk blossom.
A flamingo flower strung in
pink from the sky.  Billowed
as poppymallow, silky as
tiger lilly - maple leaf?

I picked the leaf, passed
the foundering flowers.  Picked
a laugh bluffing about maples
and meanings.  What’s in flower?
What’s dying flame?  What
isn’t borrowed?

Next day I check the maple flower
between leaves of an unborrowed
book.  It has flared, crinkled
to its capillaries, gauntly as
an octogenarian’s face.  Today
fall fell chill.  This is a leaf
the shape of a sunstorm
the flamboyance of a maple
defying definition to the death.

Clouds can be astonishing too.