October's Bright Blue Weather

Dear Reader,


Tonight we're going to a weenie roast, or at least our version of one. We'll sit by the fireside with a couple of friends torching a few franks and marshmallows, eating smores and poking the embers, and enjoying the clement weather while it lasts. In the fall I love campfire cookery. It lets me play at being a cattle-drive cookie, tending the cook-fire while the roughnecks are out working the heard and riding along on the chuck wagon to the sound of clinking pans and rattling leaf springs as I cross the untamed prairie. The weenie roast gives all the glory of a fall night by the fireside without need of hardship or horsemanship, what a deal.

A poem for the day.

October's Bright Blue Weather

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,

And flowers of June together,

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,

Belated, thriftless vagrant,

And Golden-Rod is dying fast,

And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight

To save them for the morning,

And chestnuts fall from satin burrs

Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie

In piles like jewels shining,

And redder still on old stone walls

Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things

Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,

By twos and twos together,

And count like misers, hour by hour,

October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,

Count all your boasts together,

Love loveth best of all the year

October's bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)