THIS IS MY FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR

[jade_sabre_301]

So I was driving down to Quark's apartment today looking at all the colorful trees and the hills and the rivers and I was just so happy. so happy. I haven't been home for fall in five years; I'd forgotten how much I love it. ND has an awesome fall too; I don't remember fall in Seattle much at all. (Probably because it dropped down to fifty and then just stayed there.) And it's chilly outside but not too cold to play, and the leaves are gorgeous, and it's football season, and it's NaNo season (and I don't feel like doing NaNo itself but I do want to write), and life is just lovely.

And then of course I spent like forty minutes on two miles of traffic because an 18-wheeler had gone off the road (it looked cool, but forty minutes of my life) (forty minutes of Dragon Age!), and so I became kind of grumpy, but while driving down the back highways, looking at the county folks having garage sales at the crossroads and goats grazing in the fields, this is what came to my mind:

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things-
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.