A sad, sad fig

John said I should take a picture of our fig tree, and I guess it is beautiful in a droopy sort of way. But it's not the Garden of Eden around here in November, and soon I'll have soggy raking because it will drop the leaves and (inedible) green figs all at once. Yesterday afternoon a storm came in and the wind blew through Seattle like a hurricane. It's still pitch dark, but when I look out this morning I expect the leaves will be down.

Here's a wonderful little poem John found in the NYT last weekend:

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends, into a rich mash
in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don't say
it's easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Mary Oliver
author of "Swan: Poems and Prose Poems"