Autumn - Season of Mists....

'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,' so said Keats in one of the poems I remember from school.  Actually I also remember reading it when I was starving and all that talk of fruit and nuts really striking a chord.  However, autumn is the 'most boring season', according to most.  In spring you have pretty flowers, an earth awakening and warming; summer days are long and hot, summer nights are balmy and light; winter is sparkly and hosts the grandaddy of all celebrations - Christmas.  Autumn is merely full of boring brown and things die. 
I must confess, I've never been much of an autumn fan.  If we had to say goodbye to summer, then autumn was just something to endure until the festive season turned the corner.  But for my latest book - An Autumn Crush - I had to study autumn, see it through a writer's eyes instead of through the eyes of someone who moans about the leaf-litter and is impatient to get it over and done with.  Really there is no other season which impacts on the senses as much.  Bonfire night, Halloween, Harvest Festivals:  the sky is ablaze with coloured sparks and beautiful flying lanterns.  It's the season of hot dogs and fire-smoke and walking around the streets dressed as a short witch as if it was the most natural thing in the world (surprisingly so in my case.)  And owning a dog forces you into the park and it's a hark back to my childhood seeing all the kids trying to knock down the conkers.  The colours of autumn trees are amazing. A whole autumn rainbow spectrum.  And if the scene is accompanied by early morning scarves of mist - even better.
So why is this part of the year so pretty then if it's 'dying'?  What's that all about?  And the conclusion I came to is that maybe it's to give us a message of hope - a signal that, in the words of Arnie: 'I'll be back.'  The earth is saying 'Look, I've grown the grain, plumped up the fruit, done my duty and now I'm having a rest, okay?'  But don't worry - everything might look a bit dead, but trust me, I'll be in bud again before you know it.  Ta-ra!'  And with that, the year doesn't just wither away - it puts on a West End show of colour to leave us with a lasting impression of how clever it is. 
I do a lot of local talks and heard at one recently that one of the members had to cancel her sky-dive for charity because it was too windy. The lady in question was 76. She hadn't thought 'I'm in my winter years and far too old for that stuff.'  She's gone around the seasonal clock and is back to spring again. And good on her.
Just when you might think all hope has gone, remember there is always the promise of another bud around the corner - that's the message my book carries, because I've learned that from beautiful autumn.