The Equinox is Sunday, and I've been meaning to write about late summer for what feels like forever.

I've been thinking about writing about it for months, the apex of the duldrum of our changeable year, about using the word FECUND (which I don't know how to say, exactly, except I've been saying it a lot, to a lot of you) to describe the wet, lush, green, overabundant, dense, suffocating, mold-and-moss-and-fungus-and-lichen-covered woods, the tomato blight, the rich stink of rotting wood and cardboard and grass clippings, spiders all over the corners of my apartment, slugs on the staircase, the aired houseplants swimming in their pots, blah blah blah I've been meaning to comment on how a gardener becomes ready for frost, but then AUTUMN seems to have crept up while I sat anticipating it, and all my first-seasonal-world whining remembered its winter self and shut up.

So what I'll do is just give you some pictures of a walk I took in Great Barrington, where someone is growing a ton of dahlias. Someone with persistence and smarts, as dahlias won't overwinter in this climate and have to be dug up, wrapped in burlap or buried in soil/sand, and kept in a basement all winter. Needy beautiful bitches.

So get it while you can, is I suppose the point of this post. We all love autumn, and have the most beautiful autumn in the world around these parts, and so we all start knitting and stuffing our face with cider doughnuts and whiskey with vast enthusiasm, but pretty soon we'll be wrapped in burlap in the basement (creepy! No, but you know what I mean.).

So here's to sun worship,
xoC