Mother-Daughter Press and Gay Bumgarner Images

It's coming on Harvest aka autumn

Before the 16th century, Harvest was the term used to refer to the season. However, as more people  moved from working the land to living in towns, the word harvest lost its reference to the time of year and came to refer only to the actual activity of reaping, and autumn began to replace it as a reference to the season.  The alternative word fall is limited primarily to North American English.

All cultures have an Harvest festival, and without exception the theme is a celebration of food (YIPPEE!) and eating.  A good food celebration included elaborate feasts and food displays. Tables, homes and even people were decorated  with foods such as grains, corn, flowers, fruit, gourds, acorns, corn stalks and cornucopias as well as the colors of autumn. 

Harvest celebrations are a time of gratitude and merriment combined with a dash of dread as the fall equinox -- a day of equal light and dark-- heralds the impending darkness and cold of winter.  This year the Autumn Equinox is September 23rd.  

We've creating a new gallery of Harvest season images and you can see them all in the slide show below.   It emphasizes images of New England and the Midwest, with stunning fall foliage as well the more subtle signs of the changing seasons.

Fall - Colors and Changes - Images by Gay Bumgarner
And, to go with the pictures here is a favorite poem for the Harvest season by Mary Oliver called

"In Blackwater Woods"

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver ~ (American Primative)