Weekend for Labor and the start of Fall.

Standing on the edge of the new semester, watching the mass move-ins here in Bloomington, and the opening of college football all equate to the grand openning of the fall of 2008. Easily the best time of year it is this weekend that seems to cast the long endless shadow of unending possibilities. Fall is also the time of resplendent and endless color. Especially here in the midwest. Yes, I will miss the aspens of the northern Rockies. But its the maples, the oaks, and chestnuts that seem to know color so well. Here in Indiana, that might be months away, but you can at least feel it in the air. Regardless, with the anxious wait for fall over, this time seems to be the best to simply relax and enjoy the endless possibilities.
The snapshot today is a touched up, filtered exploration of the old chicken coup in our backyard. Labor day is about slowing down and enjoying the beauty of mundane things around you. Be it the changing of the leaves, the brightness of a pumpkin blossom, or the texture of 70 year old wood, the small of the universe is what matters most.
A day such as today offers a chance to post a little Carl Sandburg. The fine labor guy as well as skilled exhibiter of the natural world of North American needs a little illustration. Enjoy the weekend, the grilling, and approaching season.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
by Carl Sandburg (taken from Cornhuskers)

SMOKE of autumn is on it all. The streamers loosen and travel. The red west is stopped with a gray haze. They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks, They make a long-tailed rider 5 In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star. . . . Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River. There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west. Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold. (A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.) 10 I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold. . . . Better the blue silence and the gray west, The autumn mist on the river, And not any hate and not any love, And not anything at all of the keen and the deep: 15 Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor, And the new corn shoveled in bushels And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows, Umber lights of the dark, Umber lanterns of the loam dark. 20 Here a dog head dreams. Not any hate, not any love. Not anything but dreams. Brother of dusk and umber.