The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.
I didn't get to experience proper autumn until I was eighteen and heading off to college on the East Coast!
Spiders are always big in the autumn: they’ve had all summer to grow.
And when you take something like the changing colour of autumn leaves and start to ask why, you’re starting off on an intellectual journey which will take you beyond that moment of visual satisfaction, while robbing nothing from that experience.
The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.
Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can’t be explained by temperature differences alone. These areas also have a greater proportion of ancient tree lineages surviving: trees have gone extinct at a higher rate in Europe compared with those other areas.
Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. It’s possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else that’s happening at this time.
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.
First published in 1984 when I was nothing more than sticks of bone at seven, 'Dragons of Autumn Twilight' began what would be one of the icons of my grunge-stained disenchanted childhood.
