“Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold” — Robert Frost

The year waxes and wanes, and each October bows its head, in deference to the season past, to accept its crown as the annual coronation of autumn commences. The foliage of a New England fall is a throne that no man is worthy of ascending. It is nonetheless gifted each year, and I am routinely humbled to bear witness.

In the changing of the seasons, spring is most often associated with renewal, but in fact each season is a renewal for a different process. The benevolent cycle that paints pastels in April works in earth tones come November when the wiser season welcomes all sojourners home.

There are footballs in the air and leaf-blown fields; droves of children, young and old, at play; groves of yesterday’s blossoms paying the passage for tomorrow’s blooms. As temperatures cool, the wardrobes change to boots and long jackets; we in the New England and mid-Atlantic states take to splitting timber and stocking cords of wood, gathering kindling for the months that will bring in Thanksgiving and the holidays that will usher in the New Year.

You may get the sense Henry David Thoreau is writing to you and Walden Pond is just behind your house. You may feel your morning commute is as picturesque as a Norman Rockwell painting and just as quaint. The plumes from fireplaces carry the charred hickory aroma that can be detected over the smell of pumpkins. Whether enjoyed as decoration or food (pies, breads, beers), pumpkins, the queen fruit of the fall, are a sweet epicurean herald that we have arrived once again at the hearth of the golden season. Long live fall!

— David Coker, advertising manager

**Join Global Traveler’s fight against blood cancers and donate to our Light the Night corporate team. Select GT staff will walk two miles Oct. 13 to raise awareness for survivors and those who have succumbed to the disease. Donate at http://pages.lightthenight.org/epa/BucksCo12/globaltravelermagazine **