Dog Stockings

Thanksgiving

The kitchen has scrumptious aromas,
The dining room looks oh, so fine,
Decorations with pilgrims and turkeys,
And now we are ready to dine! - Joanna Fuchs

Cranberry Salad

She changes cranberries to sauce

And meats to stews and stews to broths;

And when she mixes gingerbread

It turns into a man instead

With frosting collar ’round his throat

And raisin buttons down his coat. - Rowena Bastin Bennett

Scarf

Here is the scarf

we left years ago like a bookmark,

meaning to return the next day,

having just turned our heads

toward a noise in the bushes,

toward the dinnerbell in the distance,

toward what we knew and did not know

we knew, in the spreading twilight

that returns changed to a changed place. - Ted Kooser

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 6

Attach all the goodies, tie a big bow, and hang it on your mailbox.  The battery pack for the lights attached under the mailbox on my mailbox. DO NOT display until after Thanksgiving!

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 5

Get some pine picks, some berries, or whatever you like.

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 4

If you want a lighted decoration, get a set of indoor/outdoor battery powered lights.  This set turns on and off automatically.

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 3

It will look something like this when you are done bending.

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 2

Take it to the mailbox and bend it around the box. 

Christmas Mailbox Tutorial Day 1

 Start with an artificial pine "centerpiece."  Fluff up the limbs.  Start while your Thanksgiving decorations are still up.

Ain't Hungry No More

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup. - Laurie Colwin

Cornucopia

The year has turned its circle,
The seasons come and go.
The harvest all is gathered in
And chilly north winds blow. - Unknown

Halloween

 

Fear not that sound like wind in the trees:
It is only their call that comes on the breeze;
Fear not the shudder that seems to pass:
It is only the tread of their feet on the grass;
Fear not the drip of the bough as you stoop:
It is only the touch of their hands that grope —
For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night,
When the dead can yearn and the dead can smite. - Edith Wharton

Dandelion

Then I’ll be old Silverhead; for, as I grow old,
All my shining hair will be white instead of gold. - Emilie Poulsson

I Love Fall

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town. - Emily Dickinson

One Clay Soldier

I was but fifteen when I left my friends For distant climes to fight our Country's foe, And now I'm eighty—back for the first time To see the home I left so long ago. - Unknown

Fall Moon

The crescent Moon desired to mount on high.
Its slanting course ne'er grew to orbéd sway.
A little while it peered above the Hill;
Then lost in cloudy Sunset passed away. - Du Fu

Purple Scarf

The wind, for a moment,
set me down with ballet grace.
I lit upon the cold steel spokes
striking out from the wheel
like the arms of great Kali. - Charles Jensen

One Last Cone

The autumn wind and the autumn rain,
But they nod and bloom the while,
And when the wind and the rain are past
Look out with a quiet smile, - Eliza Allen Starr

Fall Fruit

At the same time I stand exposed
Here on the bush of the globe,
A newly-naked berry of flesh
For the stars to probe. - D. H. Lawrence

Buddies

Liking, partly liking, hating,
Then another hydrant, grating,
Leash at taut, leash at dangle,
Tangle, sniff, untangle,
Dog around the block, sniff. - E.B. White

Hostas

They grow splendidly in almost complete shade and will form a mass of diverse and extraordinary leaves, some of them as big as large wet buttock prints.  - Diana Wells

The Stare

With eye upraised his master's look to scan,
The joy, the solace, and the aid of man:
The rich man's guardian and the poor man's friend,
The only creature faithful to the end. - George Crabbe

Tranquil

Disheveled maples hang over the water;

Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.

Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.

The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,

The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,

The olive, velvety alder leaves,

The scarlet dogwood leaves,

Most poignant of all. - Kenneth Rexroth

Last Leaves of Autumn

The last leaf of Autumn,
Left dangling alone,
All her colorful mates
Have fallen and lost their tone. - Joseph T. Renaldi

Autumn Sunshine

 

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Fall Roses

'Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh. - Thomas Moore

Grass & Leaves

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.- Emily Bronte

Yellow Gold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. - William Shakespeare

Leaves are crimson, brown, and yellow

There is music in the meadows, in the air --
Autumn is here;
Skies are gray, but hearts are mellow,
Leaves are crimson, brown, and yellow;
Pines are soughing, birches stir,
And the Gipsy trail is fresh beneath the fir. - William Stanley Braithwaite

Apples

Oh, the peach and cherry may have their place,
And the pear is fine in its stately grace;
The plum belongs to a puckery race
And maketh awry the mouth and face;
But I long to roam in the orchard free,
The dear old orchard that used to be,
And gather the beauties that dropped for me
From the bending boughs of the apple tree. - Hattie Howard

Boooooooook!

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth. - HP Lovecraft

Cast Iron Owl

 This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. - Mervyn Peake

Same Tree Different Day

But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. - Stephen King

Storm's A-Brewin'

But now the Summer is no more, 
Its warm blue sky has vanished;
And in the trees the wind doth roar,
And flowers sweet are banished. - David Irving Dobson

October Party

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band. - George Cooper

Homemade Apple Cider Caramels

I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting. - Mark Twain

Delicious Autumn

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

Creepy Color

"Once the Virginia creeper wreathed through the barn walnut has turned wine-red and nights contract with an autumn chill, it is time to hunt deer.  Mornings hunting and mornings writing alternate in October, as if hunting and writing were two aspects of one practice."  Hunting from Home - Christopher Camuto

Fall Days

Listen! the wind is rising,
and the air is wild with leaves.
We have had our summer evenings,
now for October eves.
~Humbert Wolfe

Scary Skeleton

Trying this again.