October 26: Front door decor

Window box flowers

clashing with Indian corn,

Halloween pumpkin.

October 12: Autumn Zen

Fall leaves prayer flags.

On the front porch Buddha

contemplates a pumpkin.

September 18: Harvest

At a friend's farm: tomato vines laden with reddening globes, tight corn cobs sprouting tassles, peppers painted red and green by ripening, pumpkins swelling on the vines, here and there bodies of butternut squashes tan mounds upon the ground, young chickens pecking Japanese beetles in the sunlit yard, a woodpecker spiraling the trunk of the dying pine struck by lightning, and a broad-winged hawk silently passing over the chickadee on the branch...

Garden pregnant
with rounded bodies of squash.
Ripening: sun passing overhead.

October 6: First Frost

When I went out to my car for an early morning meeting, running late as usual, I was delayed even further by the unexpected task of having to scrape frost off my car windows. The lush, mown lawns in my neighborhood bore a pale sheen of frost, and the morning air felt frigid to my thin skin. Thankfully, I'd brought my geranium in the night before. Friends are scrambling to harvest one last round of vegetables, as another freeze is due tonight. And still the leaves remain on the trees, green, barely touched by color. They must know something we don't. I'm ready to haul out my Uggs and call it winter, but then I hear rumors that this weekend it's supposed to get back up into the 70s. Ah, the joys of living in Maine amid its vagaries of weather.

Before sunrise, frost--
but not yet on the pumpkin
freshly picked, uncarved.