Ah, October

Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. ~~ Carol Bishop Hipps

A Quote For Monday

"My favorite word is 'pumpkin.'  You are a pumpkin.  Or you are not.  I am."  Harrison E. Salisbury

Yup, I'm a pumpkin person, too.  Although, I'm not quite sure if Mr. Salisbury meant he really liked pumpkins, as I do, or if he was saying he was a pumpkin masquerading in human clothing...

A Quote For Monday on Tuesday

We are in for a spell of perfect weather now, every day luminous, every night brimmed with stars, picnics at noon, supper by the apple wood fire at night, a walk in the cool moonlight before bed. ~ Gladys Taber 

(Gosh...times flies, doesn't it? What happened to Monday?!)

A Quote for Monday

Did you ever stop to think...and forget to start again?  Winne the Pooh, via A.A. Milne 
Sketch by E.H. Shepard 
All the time, Pooh, all the time...

A Quote for Monday

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise.  It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.  Ashley Montague

A Quote for Monday

Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever.  Walt Disney

A Quote for Monday

If they breathe, they live...

If they live, they feel...

If they feel, they love...

If they love, they are aware...

If they are aware, they have a soul.  ~~ Anthony Douglas Williams

A Quote for Monday

There are times when we stop, we sit still.  We listen and breezes from a whole other world start to whisper.  James Carroll

A Quote for Monday

Summer is the time when one sheds ones tensions...and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. ~ A.L. Huxtable

A Quote for Monday

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. ~~ Emily Dickinson

A Quote for Monday

 "The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look on their face whether they see a moth or an axe murderer."  Paula Poundstone

Words on Wednesday

"A sense of beauty is the gift of God, for which those who have received it in good measure, can never be thankful enough."  Gertrude Jekyll

A Quote for Monday

"My breath would catch at the sight of violets, so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains.  The violets' message was 'Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in'."  Jessica Stern

A Quote for Monday

 

"Go down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time,
Go down to Kew in lilac time (it isn't far from London!)  A. Noyes

Well, these lilacs are a long, long ways from London, but I bet they smell just as sweet.  Maybe sweeter; there isn't any pollution up here to compete with their lovely scent. 

They're also blooming 2 months ahead of when they used to bloom, but I guess everything is off schedule during this crazy spring.  With the tiny amount of rain they received this past five years, I'm so very grateful that they're blooming at all! 

I sat out on the porch this evening and listened to the birds sing their good night songs to each other, sipped my cup of hot tea and breathed in the lilac-scented air.  Even with the drought, it's such a blessing to live up in these mountains.

A Quote For Monday

"And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves."  Wordsworth

The image is from Pinterest.  Such a darling little cottage...

I've been sitting by the fire in my own little cottage for the past hour listening to the RAIN!  We won't get a big accumulation, but, as my Scots friend says, "Some is better than none." 

And...the Christmas decorations are still up.  I consider them Winter decorations, too, so I don't take them down until I see the first Pussy Willow bud.  Considering the strange weather, that might be any day now...

A Quote for Monday

"For most people, reality is as simple as a painting, hanging before them in their frame of reference, understood and unquestioned.  I live with the awareness that under the apparent painting are countless layers, previous scenes that have been painted over.  Any physicist well-schooled in quantum mechanics or chaos theory knows that reality is a beast of mysterious dimensions and potentials and that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know."  Dean Koontz

A Quote for Monday

"Cats sleep anywhere,
Any table, any chair,
Top of piano, window ledge,
In the middle, on the edge,
Open drawer, empty shoe,
Anybody's lap will do,
Fitted in a cardboard box,
In the cupboard with your frocks -
Anywhere!
They don't care!
Cats sleep anywhere."  Eleanor Farjeon 1881-1965

And, apparently, in any position!  (This is Lucy-fur, our youngest).

A Quote For Monday

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.  You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?"  J. B. Priestly

We got a dusting of snow day/night before yesterday.  It's gone now, but the weather people are predicting a little more for this Wednesday.  I wonder if we'll ever have a real snowstorm (three or four feet over a couple of days) again.  We used to get those kind of storms three or four times a winter, in between snowfalls of just a couple of inches.  I miss them.

A Quote For Monday

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."  John Wooden

A Quote For Monday

"The grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."  John Muir, from "John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir"