Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ...

The Autumn mists have come.  Fly wakes up in a cloud, it curls into the bedroom, - I cannot stand sleeping without a window open.  (I might have to get over that too).  Visibility is so reduced that the hillside behind the houses opposite cannot be seen.  I had forgotten about this aspect of Autumn – I suppose I have never really known it from personal experience.  But the poem came to mind, and I remembered the first two lines, - Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/Close bosom friend of the maturing sun.  Then I could not remember who wrote it – one of those Romantics – Browning perhaps, Keats, …?  (Canberra relative will be ashamed of the Fly).  The Google Muse came to my aid – it was Keats.  Browning wrote the Spring one – Oh to be in England, now that April’s there….  And Hopkins covered Spring too, much to Canberra relative’s delight I’m sure.

The  mists stay until mid-afternoon.  The sun breaks through, a brief hour or two of brilliant blue sky, and then the mist steals back.  Yesterday, coming back home in the train from Strasbourg, I watched it slowly roll down the Vosges like a theatre curtain gently falling, then creep across the now almost bare vineyards, and finally shroud the dairy cows in fields near the line.  A surreal show, from a moving train.  I worry about the cows – I cannot see that there are barns for them to winter in, as at Kitzbuhel.  I shall be keeping an eye on them as it gets colder.