People often say, “Fall is my favourite time of the year.”
Well, they probably mean it, but I always think that line is merely sad acceptance that summer has flown the coop and we may as well resign ourselves to the impending chill of fall and then winter.
Have you ever noticed that the first four or five “frost warnings” can be ignored? At least in the city. But, after that watch out or your carefully nurtured tomatoes and sprawling zucchini will be frozen mush after a particularly bone-chilling September night.
Autumn is the season when your search for the rake turns up the garden hoe you couldn’t find in the spring.
And then there’s the Law of Fall, which states that more leaves blow into your yard than blow out.
A farmer was boasting to a friend about his fabulous corn crop this year, and the friend asked how many bushels the farmer harvested. The farmer said: "Well, I had a pretty good yield. I don’t know the exact number of bushels, but I stacked all I could outdoors and put the rest in the barn.”
Have you heard about the “autumn leaves cocktail?” Very potent stuff. You drink two of them, change colour and then fall to the ground.
Fall Poetry Corner, submitted by Elmer Equinox:
I like spring, but it’s too young,
Summer’s fine, but it’s too proud,
Best of all is autumn.
Its leaves are a little yellower,
Its tone mellower, Its colours richer.
Autumn is tinged a little with sorrow,
Its golden richness speaks not of the
innocence of spring,
Nor of the power of summer,
But of the mellowness and kindly
wisdom of approaching age.
Autumn knows its limitations and is
content!
An observer of the season said: “School is forging on now. Teachers are back in the saddle (sort of), students are cracking those books (sort of), and these jokes filtered out of the hallway locker:
• A class of second graders was asked by their teacher what they wanted to be when they grow up. The kids had the usual answers: doctor, lawyer, rock star, fireman, astronaut, NHL star, etc.
One little boy, however, had no answer, so the teacher pressed him further about what he wanted to be. Finally he shrugged and said, “Well, gee, this is no fair. I don't even know what I want to be for Hallowe’en yet.”
• Fall reminder: The family that rakes together, aches together.
• It was an exhausted leaf-raker who said, “Why did Isaac Newton make a law where everything has to fall down?”
Another poem?
Yes, Elmer Equinox just e-mailed another fabulous fall poem:
The smell of autumn in the air,
The golden glowing sunset there,
The heaps of scarlet apples here,
The football scores that fill the ear,
There’s just one small thing that peeves ...
Leaves!
Thanks again, Elmer, and good luck with your burgeoning poetry career. Oh, and don’t call us. We’ll have our machine call your machine, maybe.
Football follies:
• The football referee tosses the coin and says to the captain: “Okay, you won the toss, so you have your choice. You can receive or you can face the TV cameras.”
• It was a gridiron fan who said, “I’ve watched so much football that I’ve worn out my end zone.”
• It was an infrequent Gridiron observer who said: “Nowadays, when a football player is called a ‘triple-threat,’ you don’t know if it means he’s going to hold out for more money, go on strike or demand to be traded. And, tell me, why does it always take half an hour to play the last two minutes of a football game?”