The first day of fall slipped past me a couple of days ago. When does the season truly begin? When I turn on the heat.

Autumn started at 2:06 this morning. Now I bid summer a warm adieu.

Thanks for the memories. In living color.

Credit: Catherine Hamrick, Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Duke University

Treat yourself to a leisurely stroll any day of the year from 8 a.m. to dusk. There is a lot of ground to cover in this 55-acre public botanic garden, so locals can indulge in a trek every season. The same but new!

Early this morning, 850 miles away in Alabama, my sister told me, “We are with Dad. He is ready to go see Nome [Mom]. He loves you.”

Today we document our lives in hundreds of digital images and store them in a “cloud.”  Like the wonder of the telegraph in the 1800s, we send words, billions every second, via a void called the Internet and instruments cleverly branded Android and iPhone.

Ah, branding. As a savvy New York writer/agent told me at a recent book conference, “You must become a brand, or you won’t make it.” To which I retorted, “I am a person, not a brand.”

Ironic. Perhaps hypocritical: I “storytell” things and people as brands for a buck—in a staccato burst.

Dad never “branded” himself. He was a person in full.

The brain is beautiful mystery. Streaming images run in and out of our heads, faster than the…

The young pyramid towered,

Boughs layered spoke on spoke,

Foliage weave-and-fan cloaked,

Octaves of birdsong showered.

Now centuries furrow fibrous bark—

Peeling cinnamon raw and rust,

Knobby elbow branches thrust

In partial light, silhouette stark.

The leaning trunk and swelling base

Distort ancient geometry,

Brown creepers scale crevice face,

Small branches sporadically

Break and sweep, a late summer trace—

Palm-rubbed twigs breathe pungently.

Credits:

Tall incense cedars courtesy of Daniel Mayer

Black-capped chickadee courtesy of Alan D. Wilson, http://www.naturepicsonline.com

Brown creeper courtesy of Alan Vernon