Tag Archives: Summer

1071. Mother Nature is a son-of-a-gun. ~Murphy’s Tenth Law

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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon
her children the most terrifying jests.
~Thornton Wilder

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Winter? What winter? Did we have winter? We did? I do seem to remember some gray, gloomy and very short days as well as a few times when the temperature fell below freezing, barely, and the leaves fell off the trees. But was that it? That’s all we’re gonna get? No blue northers? No snow? No sleet? No ice? No fog? No rain? Nada, zip, zilch! Or is it gonna be like what’s happened sometimes before, Mother Nature? You’re gonna let everything get started in the garden and then wham bam! You’re gonna hit us hard with a late and bitter blast of winter’s fury that will nip everything in the bud as it has before. Or maybe, you’re just gonna let us move right along into an early spring and then onto a very, very long hot summer, one that’s so especially wretched that it redefines what a  long, hot summer truly is? Is that it? Oh fickle, fickle Mother Nature, what a beastly shrew you can be from time to time! Okay, okay, I know it’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature or say bad things about her. So perhaps I ought to strive to see the error of my fractious ways once again and just be grateful for the exquisite beauty above and below that started blooming in my yard today.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ~Romans 7:21  ✝

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1027. Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage. ~Thomas Kincade

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Many miles away there’s a shadow
on the door of a cottage
on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake.
~Sir Walter Scott

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Let there be a cottage….a real cottage…a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and autumn—beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, not be spring, nor summer, nor autumn—but winter, in his sternest shape. This is a most important point in the science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and think it matter of congratulation that winter is going; or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely every body is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without… ~Thomas De Quincey

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Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars… ~Psalm 148:7-9   ✝

**Images via Pinterest

966. Some places speak distinctly. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

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Paris is a place where just walking down a street
that I’ve never been down before
is like going to a movie or something.
Just wandering the city is entertainment.
~Wes Anderson

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Every time I look down on this timeless town
Whether blue or gray be her skies
Whether loud be her cheers or whether soft be her tears
More and more do I realize
That I love Paris in the spring time
I love Paris in the fall
I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles
I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles
I love Paris every moment
Every moment of the year
I love Paris, why oh, why do I love Paris?
Because my love is there.
~Excerpted lyrics
by songwriters Blondy, Alpha

I ran across this image of Paris last night on Pinterest, and the splendor of it brought into the foreground of my mind once again why, like the song above says, I love Paris every moment of the year. The river is the beautiful Seine. Over the two bridges in the foreground on the Île de la Cité is Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris with its renowned flying buttresses. In the background I see the top of the Musée de l’Orangerie des Tuileries, the permanent home for 8 of Monet’s water lily murals as well as works by Cezanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Renoir, Rousseau, Sisley, and others. Behind that I see the top of the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. And these are only a few of the things that so long ago made captive my heart. Gertrude Stein once said that the US was her country and that Paris was her home. I instantly understood how she felt. Glad am I that the Lord who delights to give us the desires of our hearts is  faithful to His promises for twice now He has granted me the opportunity to spend time in the magical place that is the city of Paris. Ooh la la! Je t’adore Paris!

Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. ~Psalm 36:5  ✝

930. The spirits of the air live on the smells of fruit; and joy, with pinions light, roves round the gardens, or sits singing in the trees. ~William Blake

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And November sad,—a psalm
Tender, trustful, full of balm,
Thou must breathe in spirits calm.
~Caroline May

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I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content. ~Lin Yutang

I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit. ~Leviticus 26:4  ✝

**Image via Pinterest

890. The music of summer yet flutters in the middle of the day around Autumn seeking its former nest. ~Edited and adapted excerpt by Rabindranath Tagore

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Early mornings are cool now though autumn is still young.
Dew on the lotus scatters pure perfume;
Wind on the bamboos gives off a gentle tinkling.
~Edited and adapted excerpt
by Po Chu (772-864)

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The harvest moon hung round and high
It dodged clouds high in the sky,
The stars winked down their love and mirth
The Autumn season was giving birth.
Oh, it must be October…
~Pearl N. Sorrels

I will dance
The dance of day’s dawning
And scattering fragrances

I will dance
The dance of day’s closing
And twinkling stars

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy. ~Psalm 65:8  ✝

**Lotus image via Pinterest

889. What I love is near at hand, always, in earth and air. ~Theodore Roethke

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I will dance
The dance of summer’s passing
And waning feverishness

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I will dance
The dance of October’s coming
And fall’s beguiling ways

I will dance
The dance of golden light
And the ever-shortening days

I will dance
The dance of autumn’s beauty
And whirling lovely leaves

I will dance
The dance of cooling winds
And clouds bearing rain

I will dance
The dance of meeker morn’s
And migrating flocks of birds

I will dance
The dance of earth’s melodies
And songs a-blowing in the wind

I will dance
The dance of God’s Creation
And ever-changing seasons
~Natalie Scarberry

Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp. ~Psalm 149:3   ✝

**Image via Pinterest

888. We know that in September we will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. ~Henry Rollins

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The lawn is pressed by unseen feet as
summer’s ghost surreptitiously returns at
dawn and retreats again at twilight…
~Edited and adapted quote
by T.S. Eliot

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Bye, bye summertime, hello cooler spells
I think I’m gonna sm-ile
Bye bye scorching days, hello chilliness
I feel like could celebrate
Bye bye September goodby-eye
Bye bye September goodby-eye
~Adapted lines from the song,
Bye Bye Love, recorded by the Everly Brothers in 1957

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” ~Genesis 8:22  ✝

**Image via Pinterest; text by Natalie

884. “I grow old, I grow old,” the garden says. It is nearly October. ~Excerpt from Robert Finch

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For summer here, bear in mind,
is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk
of leaving when September rises to go.
~George Washington Cable

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the air is different today
and the wind sings
with a new tone
sighing of changes coming…
~Rhawk

When September rises to go here, it is then that the amazing spider lily sits upon her scarlet throne. And when bejeweled in water beads from the sprinkler, her exotic, otherworldly charms grace the garden with a magical sort of sparkle and a melody that indeed seem to sigh along with the wind about coming changes.

…the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. ~Psalm 103:16  ✝

880. Autumn comes with a subtle change in the light, with skies a deeper blue… ~Glenn Wolff and Jerry Dennis

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The stretch between dusk and dawn
A mere whisper in the wind
~reocochran at:
https://witlessdatingafterfifty.wordpress.com

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And so it has been with the coming of the autumnal equinox. Autumn is yet a mere whisper in the wind between yesterday’s dusk and today’s dawn. However, with its arrival the “powers of summer” must now slowly disrobe themselves and go back from whence they came. Despite being sapped and dry from surviving the dog days of summer’s wrath, we should now be able to anticipate the coming of fall’s crisp days that will invigorate us, to hear murmurs of music in untamed winds that will blow freshness into us, to watch bird migrations that will that lift our spirits in the deepening blue skies, and to expect blustery storms that will infuse their energy into our heat-wearied flesh. Oh autumn, how happily we greet thee with our eager yearning for your scents and shapes, sounds and hues.

The birds are consulting, about their migrations,
the trees are putting on the hectic
or the pallid hues of decay,
and begin to strew the ground,
that one’s very footsteps may not
disturb the repose of earth and air, while
they give us a scent that is
a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.
Delicious autumn!
My very soul is wedded to it, and if
I were a bird I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. ~James 1:17  ✝

**Image via Pinterest, text by Natalie

875. The foliage began losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many. ~Adapted quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Lord, it is time.
Summer has been very big.
Lay thy shadow on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.
Command the last fruits that they shall be full;
give them only a few more southerly days,
~Adapted quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

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September days have the warmth of summer in their briefer hours but in their lengthening evenings a prophetic breath of autumn.  The cricket chirps in the noontide, making the most of what remains of his brief life.  The bumblebee is busy among the blossoms of the aftermath, and their shrill and dreamy hum hold the outdoor world above the voices of the songbirds, now silent or departed. ~Rowland E. Robinson

Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread everywhere. Let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits. ~Song of Songs 4:16  ✝

**Image via Pinterest