I know it has felt like summer a lot recently but the signs of autumn are upon us and soon hot pants will be replaced by corduroy and tending gardens will be abandoned for washing purple bird shit off my car. Why do birds have to eat poke berries and then shit on my car? Should I be so blessed with abundance in nature as to have both birds and pokeweed along my daily commute?
Until it really starts to feel like autumn, let’s enjoy one last picture of bounty from my garden. Imagine the taste – a sweet earthiness mixed with a lip-tingling spice, whose heat reminds us of the scorch of sun as the shadows grow longer and daylight wanes.
A toast to the summer! To borrow from John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim
This is what I think of when I think back on summer days – the joy and carefree sense of my days, keeping a light heart and drinking, even if just symbolically, from a fluted glass as the wine of life flows through my veins.
What literary or pictorial allusions bring you back to the warmth of summer?
This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
