Autumn!

Hi everyone, we hope you’re enjoying leaves, or at least the palm fronds. We’d like to recommend that as you enter the autumn, you make it Washington Irving season.

Here is a wonderful opening paragraph from his story “Rip Van Winkle” that is guaranteed to conjure some autumnal images in your head:

Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, wen the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.

The next paragraph includes seeing “a light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape.” Now, none of that is explicitly autumnal, but you cannot help but picture those upstate leaves and the way those barometer mountains reflect changes in seasons. So as you prepare to cozy up, consider picking up something by Washington Irving, like The Sketch Book.