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Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #17

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From John Muir Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies and Letters by John Muir:

“The fir woods are delightful sauntering-grounds at any time of year, but most so in autumn. Then the noble trees are hushed in the hazy light, and drip with balsam; the cones are ripe, and the seeds, with their ample purple wings, mottle the air like flocks of butterflies; while deer feeding in the flowery openings between the groves, and birds and squirrels in the branches, make a pleasant stir which enriches the deep, brooding calm of the wilderness, and gives a peculiar impressiveness to every tree.”

Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #16

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From the (very dark, extra-super-creepy, not for the squeamish, perfectly chilling for the day before Halloween but best not read at night) novel Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates:

“My name is Q__ P__ & I am thirty-one years old, three months. Height five feet ten, weight one hundred forty-seven pounds…. Distinguishing features: none….”

“I see my probation officer Mr. T__ alternate Thursdays 10 A.M., downtown Mt. Vernon. My therapist Dr. E__ Mondays 4 P.M., University Medical Center. Group therapy with Dr. B__ is Tuesdays 7 P.M. I am not doing well, I think…. I know they are writing reports. But I am not allowed to see. If one of these was a woman I would do better, I feel. They believe you, they are not always watching you. EYE CONTACT HAS BEEN MY DOWNFALL….”

“Mon. 4:00 P.M.-4:50 P.M. Mt. Vernon Medical Center on the other side of the campus, in good weather I walk & in bad weather drive…. Dr. E__ says ‘Well, Quentin. This brisk autumn air is a tonic isn’t it. After our long hot summer.’ There is a double meaning in this I know…. [It] is awkward in Dr. E__’s office. I sit across from his desk & stare at the floor. Or at my hands I have scrubbed. RAISINEYES’ wristwatch on my left arm & its bronze face secret where I watch the tiny numerals flashing bronze. & around my right wrist my solitary memento of SQUIRREL. Dr. E__ asks do I have any dreams to speak of today. There is a flurry of leaves against the window behind him & the sky is darkening so early….”

Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #14

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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.”