Call me petty, but I did spend a certain amount of yesterday savoring the image of Steve Bannon getting arrested by the post office. Now, if they can only drag Kushner into the stocks . . .

Schadenfreude aside, it was a quiet day, though not particularly productive, editing-wise. I kept getting interrupted by this-and-that obligation: bread rising, errand running, offspring chatting, Bannon gloating. Maybe today I'll be able to buckle down.

Autumn is certainly in the wind--mornings suddenly so much darker, nights suddenly knifed with coolness--yet the days retain their summertime crackle and hiss. 

Just because I adore him so, here is my beloved Keats, saying it all so beautifully--

To Autumn

 

            John Keats

 

  I.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

            Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

            With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

            And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

            Until they think warm days will never cease,

                        For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

  II.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

            Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

            Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

            Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

                        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

            Steady thy laden head across a brook;

            Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

                        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

  III.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

            Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

            And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

            Among the river sallows, borne aloft

                        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

            Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

            The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

                        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.