A Fall Shawl, Y'all
My wife and I visited Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park the other day, and in the pic below, the colors just do not show as they did in real life – but I could not help but think of these lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Summer begins to have the look”:
Autumn begins to be inferred By millinery of the cloud Or deeper color in the shawl That wraps the everlasting hill
The complete poem is here:
Here’s another take on Autumn from Dickinson in a letter she wrote to Mrs. J. G. Holland:
It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to be the Norway of the year.
By the way, here are a few pics from the meadow from late in the summer:
