I would sit on this bench beyond reach and write of autumn things. The burnt colors: burnt umber, burnt sienna. The wistful downwards triad of a golden-crowned sparrow. The lucent hundred-year-old catsup bottle on a windowsill facing the sunset, offering something hard to express, something elusive about time and loss and bubbles caught in glass.
Tom Stoppard puts it perfectly, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: "Autumnal—nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day . . . Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it . . . Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses . . . deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth—reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke."
image: Christie B. Cochrell, Sheffield Park and Garden
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