Welcome to autumn says Garden of Green Fables with its deep pink zinnias and its bright orange mums. The ground is generously peppered with acorns from the surrounding oaks and the leaves serve as eclectic and misshapen rugs on the garden floor. It’s tired and beautiful, rich and quiet. Here we are in with our chance to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in the autumn season set before us.
Make your own sound track for the season.
To celebrate the season, I play music in the garden. It backdrops our long afternoons playing, sitting, lying back, or chatting with friends. A simple Spotify playlist of how our garden feels in the fall brings a depth to the season and an awareness of the quiet, bursting, beautiful changes at hand. So for us autumn in the air is on repeat, but string together your own playlist with all the songs that immerse you in this season and how it feels and looks and is for you.
Make a mess in the kitchen. (It doesn’t have to be apple pie, it just has to smell like warm dessert!)
The kitchen will smell delicious with apples stewing in sugar and spice. Flour will blanket the counter in that haphazard way and the rolling pin will finally have its time to shine.
The hand pies may turn out dry or they may turn out fine, but it will probably take a few attempts before you rest your case.
Either in failure or success the aroma is always the same…autumnal, cozy, delicous.
Send seasonal letters with Happy Fall greetings to family and close friends.
The writing desk will be stamps and stickers and an accidental inked heart in the surface. The seasonal letters will go out sans Halloween or turkeys, because you found out the secret password…
VINTAGE.
Searching with the word vintage on Amazon or Pinterest will find you the makings of the happiest fall mail. Those warm colored tones that remind you of thick mugs and knitted blankets by the fireside is at your fingertips. Type vintage in the search bar.
Get lost in a new book series or re-read an old favorite. Open the windows, listen to music, light a candle.
Those minutes before bed will be filled with an adventurous tale accompanied by emotional and fantastical music. You’ll have crooked pencil underlines on quotes that matter to you. Cricket sounds outside the window are becoming quieter, the air on some nights will rush in through the screen–brisk, layered, rich. You’ll close the book, blow out the candle and go to bed. Much too late…again.
Memorize the sweet parts of your life season. Let it sink in. Joy feels precarious.
(But! We’re safe with God.)
At moments in this change of season as the world slowly grows more quiet and more still, you may feel that bittersweet heart-sickness. Everything in the moment so good you don’t want it to pass or become memory. The twinkle lights above your bed dot the present in exclamation points. The sound machine in the kids room will thunder on and you’ll listen closely.
Your boy is three and school feels so soon, and you think how one day you’ll be old and you’ll look back at this time and you’ll be able to see it clearly, because right now you’re memorizing it, thankful for it, lying right there letting the sweetness of it sink in.
A great love story is always so worth the risk. And this is a great one. You feel the joy. Fall asleep.
Autumn at Garden of Green Fables is a gentle awakening to what has already been so vibrantly good in the year. It’s an invitation to punctuate life with the delight of a pumpkin or two, a handful of apple pie. Autumn here is no timid thing, but it isn’t bright and shiny either. It’s a happy cheer for life. It’s roots that say, “I’m right here and I’m glad.” It’s a bucket list which doesn’t include the work of carving a pumpkin. What more could you ask for?
Maybe more pie, I guess.😉
simple peanut butter cookie recipe
(That’s if you have no time or patience for hand pie! note: best eaten straight away!)
(Spotify playlist on repeat in Green Fables. This is what the garden feels like this time of year…enjoy the escape!)
(FREE download & highly recommend to add to your fall reading stack!)
Sierra V. Fedorko 
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