The Autumn Of Our Days

I was chatting on the ‘phone to a friend this evening (I will give her the cloak of anonymity and she can break it if she so wishes) about the clear sky with the stars tumbling around us from it and we were comparing our respective evenings.  The conversation turned, the way chats tend to, towards autumn and whether we were in our autumns yet.  I suggested that we were in our late summers.  Perhaps, being diplomatic, I said she was in her mid summer.  As we are the same age this seemed a bit of an unnecessary sop.  Anyway she had autumn on her mind and couldn’t get that out of her head.  So I quoted the first couple of lines from John Keats’ Ode to Autumn.  It clicked.  She had done it at School.  The whole of the first verse is:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

We had both decided that we were so lucky to be alive and living as we do at the moment.  We both decided that the word contentment featured high in our description of our lives. 

Yes.  Life is good.