OUTONO II

Considerações sobre Outubro

"The first frost came on the sixth of October after the rains and the coldness. In the morning everything was silver and icy, the tall grasses delicate as glass and blue with a frosty bloom. The earth was sheathed in frost; and after the sun rose, the shadows of the house and trees were blue on the ground, and all around them, defining them, the sun-released grasses turned wet and green. The hard maple at the end of the road had turned gold in every leaf and stood motionless under the morning moon—which looked naked and lost in the blue sky. A solitary crow flew over between the moon and the lighted tree.

The early part of October is a beautiful and uncertain time, cold and wet and dry and warm. The trees have a drying yellow color all over the countryside with only a solitary burning light here and there. Our black kittens move out distastefully into the cold mornings. One is a new, imported kitten, a pure Persian, who seems out of place among the vines and falling leaves and autumn disorder. He was four months old when we got him, and had never been out of the house, but so big already—so enormous, in fact—that we named him Monstro, and he padded about like a furry whale. He regarded each descending leaf with terror, and spent his first days glued to the door like a caterpillar. As time passed, however, he ventured into the long grass step by step, sniffing the menacing weeds and shying away from grasshoppers. He watched the other kitten, Minx, who has a quarter Persian in her blood and an odd wild face like a pine marten, catch a vole, and sat respectfully two feet away, a kind of furry wonder on his big child face. He has caught nothing so far himself except a grasshopper, but this is a great advance for the housebound ball, and he goes as far as the woodpile by himself and even to the edge of the giant grasses in the garden."

Josephine Johnson,"October Frost"(1953)