How To Enjoy Autumn 101

1. Purchase pumpkins, apples, and mums from your local farm or orchard.

2.Pull out your best apple cider recipes. Serve in toile mugs with cinnamon sticks stirrers.

3.Make s'mores by a campfire.

4. Buy cloves and cinnamon. Throw them in a pot along with orange peels and some boiling water. Homemade potpourri is the best!

5. Purchase a kitschy scarecrow from your local craft store. Name him.

6.Bundle up, go outside, and appreciate the colors. Find the best acorns and leaves and savor them for awhile. Put them in your pockets. Hold them up to the light.

7. Constantly be on the lookout for leaves with the best "crunchage".

8. Go to the county fair and walk through the quaint haunted house. Ride the ferris wheel. Eat caramel apples and cotton candy.

9. Go to a corn maze. Throw away the map and just run around in the dark with a flashlight. With friends.

10. Only eat things A.) Covered in caramel B.) Having to do with apples and pumpkins.

11. Try to work the words "autumn" and "fall" into every conversation. At least twice.

12. Take a drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

13. Wear plaid and jewel tones.

14. Invest in a pair of socks covered in leaves or pumpkins.

15. Read "fall-books." Some of my favorites are The Perilous Gard, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and any Sherlock Holmes adventures or Agatha Christie novels. Also, John Updike has a great children's book entitled A Child's Calendar with some great fall poems.

16. Watch mystery movies like Arsenic and Old Lace, The Village, and Bob Hope's The Cat and the Canary.

17. Go on a hayride.

18. Make a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. Then make another.

19. Buy a candy-corn scented candle.

20. Have a pumpkiny pancake breakfast with apple cider syrup and hot chocolate.

21. Incorporate nutmeg into your life as much as possible.

22. Buy new leather boots and a fuzzy scarf.

23. Watch It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown once every day. On Saturdays, watch it twice.

24. Rake leaves together until you have a massive pile. Jump in them. Be gleeful and child-like as you do this.

25. Be happy. Because fall is here!

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

~George Eliot~

Enjoy,

Feeling A Bit Like Robert Frost Lately...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There is a reason this poem graces the pages of every middle school literature anthology in America. It also makes sense that the immensely approachable Frost won a Pulitzer at least four times. This poem is real. It describes what all of us, 7th graders or MA graduates (as is soon to be my story), feel at some point or another.

I begin my last (!) semester of grad school this Monday. How quickly/slowly the time has gone! And after? I do not know what will happen. Perhaps an adjunct teaching position at my alma mater? International travel (My husband and I seem to have an unquenchable thirst for all things international)? Teaching homeschool groups English and Spanish? Publishing (writing is a given)? Heaven forbid, more school? I know that the possibilities are endless! I will try to keep you all posted on what is soon to be an exciting and scary season of our lives and will try to be a bit more regular with my posts as well!