The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.