Autumn: Nothing Gold Can Stay

September is my favourite month. The days are sunny and warm with a nip in the air. The nights are chilly, allowing me to snuggle under my down comforter. Most of the trees here in the foothills are still green, but oft their edges are tipped with gold, their hardest hue to hold, as Mr. Frost so aptly penned.

This morning the sun chased me from under my warm nest of covers. I slipped outside as the Morning Star illumined the yellow leaves of a tree that had turned early. My eyes lingered on the half-green, half-amber dryads lining the river. A gilded stream of leaves coursed through the channel along the sidewalk. The chill breeze chased the citron leaves along the street, their frail frames scuttling the direction I, too, traversed. They chased me like an unbidden memory invades the present. I let them come. Indeed, I hardly had the power to stop their swirling dance any more than I could quell an impetuous memory.

Freshness hung in the air, mingling with the aroma of crunching leaves. Sunshine filtered through the torn cotton clouds and settled on the distant Pike's Peak, crowning it with gold. But even the gold of early dawn could not long tarry, and neither could I. I dropped my letters in the post box and made for home, eager to read the next chapter in Orthodoxy; but that is a topic for another post.

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost