Autumn is old-fashioned, and my personal images of the season can't be tugged much beyond Grandpa and Grandma's long-gone farm.

My Autumn is a tan, straw-hatted boy strolling and kicking through the gold and bronze riches given up by aspens and maple trees. It is a narrow twisting lane, dividing red-barned farms where plump, rioteously orange pumpkins tumble all together at the gardens edge. The fall of the year is a time and a place where scarecrows humbly bow their floppy heads after a job well done.

Autumn is the cornucopia's bounty gathered in bushels and baskets and jars; it's the pickles and kraut from Grndma's root celler. It's mounds of cornhusks and apples with the taste of honey. It's a great copper-colored moon that dwarf's the planet, and makes a back-drop for a navy-blue horizon.

Autumn must have been born in a Heavenly country house; near pearly gray fences and old crooked gates with a finger of smoke from its chimney and a hint of frosty breath from its throat. Autumn always comes bursting loose from the hills and orchards with colors bright and brilliant. Late August explodes with sunny, saffron tufts of stubble from cut fields. It sizzles with yellow ochres and burnt sienna's left tattered from the harvest; the scene in disarray, with beigy-brown potatoes and amber yams. Autumn came out of Earth's womb with the electric touch of a Master painter and a supernatural color-wheel.

Autumn can't ever be tempted to don a fashionable ensemble. Her gown is every summers glory held captive for the moment among the blazoned, marching hills, with every fiery bush an accessory.

Autumn's trees were born to dance. Any whispery breeze may set the tempo and the waltz begins-across the county, the country, the continent. When the last leaf is on the ground, the golden season tip-toes to the sidelines, making way for Winters hulking, dancing bear.

Yet, Autumn is a stand-up comic, a clown dressed from a cosmic box of crayons. He grins with some unnamed humor bubbling and gurgling up from the ample belly. There is the hint of a wonderful, mind-blowing secret, barely held in check--waiting for the okay to tell it all-----Yesssssssssssssssssss!