Tag: fall colors

Fall Beauty

October 23, 2025

Dear Liza,

Our Portland Fall has kicked into colorful overdrive this week.

I love this time of year, with the cooler temperatures and rain giving abundant permission to stay inside with books, yea, and kittens. Calm is easier in Fall than in frantic, growing Summer.

It also feels like Shakespeare weather. I read through the sonnets and found the one that had been tickling my brain. I have taken the liberty of modernizing the language and cutting two lines which leaned a bit too heavily on death for my taste.

Rewritten Sonnet 73

That time of year you may in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me you see the twilight of such day

After sunset has faded in the west.

In me you see the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of my youth do lie,

As the bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This you  perceive, which makes your love more strong,

To love that well which you must leave ere long.

And before you worry, I am happy and well. Just a bit older and Autumn-introspective.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Changes in the Bonsai

Dear Liza,

Our nighttime temperatures are heading toward freezing, and the Hundred Acre Wood is finally changing color.

The lanky larch is getting yellow and losing its needles.The evergreen juniper stays green, of course. And the Japanese maple, Toranaga-sama, is getting red on his lower leaves.

Because the nights are so cold, we have brought all the plants up by the house. The acacia’s red blooms look so pretty with the red leaves!

And when you lean over and see them from above, it’s even better. The moss sure looks happy, right?

Sometime this winter I will scissor train the maple and the larch, and trim up the juniper. I can’t wait until spring when it all starts over again.

Love,

Grandma Judy