A single leaf fell to the ground and held her eye all the way.
It was her first walk into Autumn. She was four years old that day.

She shivered as the leaf touched down, and said, "Granddad, am I brave?"
"Of course, little dumplin', but are you cold?"
"No," she said, " but a rabbit just ran 'cross my grave."

And when she sighed, her tiny breath turned silver in the air.
"As silver," thought her granddad, "as what's left of my hair."

He thought of an early Autumn, and a mist below the ridge,
A springtime  girl, a Model-A, and a creaking, covered bridge.

"Dear God," he thought, "how old am I, and where have the years all flown?
If I have my share of Autumns, I'll soon see this one grown."

Just then she squeezed his little finger, beguiling woman-child.
"So like her own grandmother," he thought. He looked at her and smiled.

They crunched and slid near an acient mill asleep by the old canebrakes.
"When you walk in the Fall," she said, "it sounds just like cornflakes."

She wondered why the leaves fell down, to leave the trees undressed.
"It's like when you have to go to bed each night," he said. "Mother Nature needs her rest."

"She sets the alarm for April. Now, see this tiny thing?
It's a bud that means a new wardrobe when she dresses the trees in Spring.

"And the leaves that crackle when we walk that sound like your cornflakes
Not only feed the buds, you see, but cover Man's mistakes."

"You, too, are like the Spring," he thought,-" no melancholy fears-
You came along like an April song, to warm my November years."

Don Barber, 1969