Autumn Gloom

“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”

-J.K. Rowling

Back from Manhattan late yesterday, swooping through Corning to release the cats from their luxury prison to take them with us to the lake for the night. We stopped at our favorite farmer's stand just up the hill, buying some of the last of the season's tomatoes and the first of the Honey Crisp apples that are starting to arrive to the delight of the locals.

Dean and Slane seem to appreciate a chance to go outside and breathe a little fresh air, the biggest casualty of our moving from Tara to the School House.

I had ambitions for this morning's post that will have to wait for another day, because a general gloom and dissatisfaction with the state of things started settling over me last night, complete with work terrors at 4 a.m. I've been free of those for a little while, and am disappointed at their return. Maybe it's seasonal. The Germans even have a word for it, "herbstmelancholie". I learned that in my 8th grade German class. That was about the only language in which I ever showed any kind of aptitude--I was an utterly inept Russian speaker in college, and my travel French barely got me through ordering a cup of coffee or asking for directions. Then again, I had a lot more brain plasticity in middle school, and that was several thousand beers before I tried my hand at the other two languages.

So anyway, my exegesis on Genesis 3 and atonement theology, sort of a revelation based on a comment I heard at St. Mark's this past Sunday, wll have to wait. It would have likely been the sort of half-baked theological rambling Constantine was known to declaim to his baffled bishops in the years after his battlefield conversion, so maybe the world is better off if I keep my limited understanding of scriptural revelation to myself.