Some of our most enigmatic poetry was written in the autumn… Blake, Shakespeare, Keats. Reading the first verse of Keats’ Ode to Autumn, it feels as if he must have known our valley. 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-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d 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’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. Walking around our hillside, along the tracks, beside the river, it is evident to us that the chill hand of autumn has waved over our secret valley. There is a lingering freshness in the morning, the sort of cold that makes you choose to wear socks, which is replaced at mid-day by the sort of heat we are more accustomed to in August. These are the days of an Indian summer, as the locals harvest a few choice olive trees of their fruits to be taken to the cooperativa to be cured and packed into jars. The leaves on the last vegetables are yellow and mildewed, only the pomegranate trees are in their pomp. Pablo is gathering the acorns to feed to his black pigs.
5 to remember
enigmático/a – enigmatic
la poesía – poetry
una oda – an ode
el otoño – autumn
un verso – a verse