In the morning (as I write this) Lois and I will leave for Holmes County, Ohio to celebrate forty years of marriage. Sunday night we drove down to Camp Selah to give testimony four decade of the goodness faithfulness of God to us. Tonight I’m gathering my thoughts out on the east-facing porch enjoying the quietness, the crickets, and a soft breeze in the golden hour and thinking about you all, Bethel, my parish.
Cars pass tonight with their widows open to the country air. Across the road the the Maples are already showing some color inter uppermost branches. The trees that line the near north field blushing with a hint of autumn color. The ditches and unmowed meadows are yellow with goldenrod. The big Elms shed bright yellows leaves a few and a time when the breeze moves the branches. The Elms will not lose all their leaves until the first few days of November, but soon and very soon they will be bare as will the Maples and Oaks that surround our beloved Bittersweet Farm.
Autumn is upon us. Like life, it will come and go too quickly. The leaves we so longed for in the spring will blow down and gray clouds will blow in on cold air followed by winter snows. Let’s just say it the way it is.
There will be cool, golden October afternoons of college football. There may be hayrides and trips to the pumpkin patch and there will be maidens laughing and talking with pumpkin-spice drinks. Maybe there will be a bit of warm Indian summer, but the cold and the snow are sure as death to come. We will need to top-off the anti-freeze, check the furnace, get the mower deck off the tractor and the snow blade on and ready ourselves for winter.
The seasons turn. The years come and go. Today I talked with a lady from Kentucky who will have a memorial gathering for her son on Saturday. He was only fifty-five.
“He told his son he would not live long and he didn’t. Somehow he knew,” she said with great sadness in her voice.
Life is uncertain but it is certain that it will end one day and none of us knows that day, so it’s good that the seasons turn and remind us that the things we love and cherish will one day die. And one day we will die unless the Lord returns first. And while we can we warn and we witness, serve and we love, and we live with all our might and all our spirit until the last light of every day falls beyond the trees and fades into night.
Wise people are not unprepared for these things. Wise people take note of the turning seasons and they take care of what needs to be done.
Summer ends Saturday night. Sunday morning will be the dawn of our first fall day by the way I measure seasons. Winter months are December, January, and February. Spring months are March, April, and May, Summer months are June, July, and August. That leaves September, October, and November for Autumn. That is the Bittersweet way to see the seasons. 
I have to admit there might have been some pumpkin cream in one of my ice coffees this week. We linger outdoors this time of year as long as we can. Evenings out on Bittersweet are pagents of fragrance and slanting golden light. We eat on the porch. We putter among the flowers. We breathe in the summer evening air and listen with our hearts as the sounds of a country night come on. It’s been cool for summer. We are sleeping with the windows open to the nighttime. We’ve had little rain this summer after a very wet spring, so July and August were sunny months in these parts. 
The neighbors, Marty and Pat, have cats. A bunch of them. They are indoor cats. I don’t remember the exact number but I do know it is in the double digits.
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