By Bobbie Glasheen

From our lovely porch on Cedar Street, I can sit forever and watch the birds change color and fall from the trees. It is a sere and ominous season … if you’re a bird.

For me, not a bird, the pervading tone is so rich in memory. Actually, I suppose I muse mostly about food. Turkey, with or without the buckshot, pumpkin bread weighing in at 25 pounds a loaf, mulled wine and mulled family members, chili sauce, acorns from the ordnance division. Better I should roll my Subaru than be struck dome-wise by one of those puppies.

Someone in this neck of the woods once ate acorns.  I am digressing. Food always does that to me. Better stick to the falling birds.

Autumn marks the downward turn in the melody that carries me through the year. My ear pressed to the ground, I can hear the fugue that is slip-sliding me into the first snowfall, dark afternoons and high propane bills.

Why am I not depressed? Here’s why.  While I had my ear on the ground, I heard the faint sound of hooves approaching. Cloven hooves with a light and airy footfall. The smell of cigar. And then “Hi-O Silver” and the sleigh comes into view … all my spouse and I need to send us into paroxysms of gay abandon and wild spending.

The ground is littered with dead birds. In time, it will be dead reindeer and empty peanut shells.