Just now, and until the clock gets reset in a week or two, the dawn comes up in full view from my patio doors while I am eating breakfast. On clear days it is magnificent and changes colors, catching different cloud groups minute by minutes. Maybe I will have to start getting up a bit earlier for a while to continue to have coffee and toast with sunset on the side. Gradually it will become later until the end of December.
Here on Cape Cod autumn is parsimonious and later than on the "mainland" -- the ocean keeps us a bit warmer and I have no quarrel with that. I have in my memory bank some upstate New York autumns when whole hillsides were so brilliantly colored under the purest of blue skies that I could hardly breathe, so awed was I. Sometimes I stopped a car on the shoulder of a country road to sit and gaze.
Having had those autumn scenes, I do not feel deprived by our little touches of color and the late occasional blaze among the browns and fir tree greens. One of the rewards of living in awareness as I have mostly tried to do is that, just as I have collections of rings, bracelets, earrings, [none precious stones but mostly semiprecious] which I collected on travels, I have heaps and reams and collections of memories -- a richness I enjoyed at the time and can continue to enjoy many years later as I'm reminded by a little bunch of leaves or a spreading sunrise.
