Category: new york state

From the short story “Before Autumn” in Just an Ordinary Day: Stories by Shirley Jackson:

“All that summer she had been increasingly aware of the growing turbulence among the trees, and in the grasses, and around the hills; in the vegetable garden each morning there had been vague markings of snails, and the trees were less certain of their birds, somehow, she thought, and more noisy in the wind. That the paints had something to do with it she was certain; before the sudden violence of green in the paint box the grass flattened and grew bladed and pale, and the hills plunged mistily ahead of a purple so carefully compounded of blue, and red, and white, and sometimes, in the late afternoons, yellow.”

From Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley:

“Autumn passed thus. I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall, and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I first beheld the woods and the lovely moon. Yet I did not heed the bleakness of the weather; I was better fitted by my conformation for the endurance of cold than heat. But my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and all the gay apparel of summer; when those deserted me, I turned with more attention towards the cottagers…..”

[ … uh-oh, sounds like bad news for the cottagers…. ]

From Dracula by Bram Stoker:

“It was a lovely morning; the bright sunshine and all the fresh feeling of early autumn seemed like the completion of nature’s annual work. The leaves were turning to all kinds of beautiful colours, but had not yet begun to drop from the trees….”