Autumn day... coffee and Roundhay Park

Sunday, I decided that I would be diligent in my studies. It was to be a day of neck straining research and copious note taking! So off I went to library with a good breakfast in my stomach for hours of reading and writing, and glad to do it! The library has these windows that flood light over while you read, and if I can snag a chair in the Shakespeare section then I could stay for hours... (To be honest, I could live there, the desks may even be more comfortable than my current bed.) It has morphed into a nice place in which to rendezvous with my fellow students of the Renaissance.

After almost three hours of work, I started to be anxious, the weather was SO NICE on Sunday, sunny, warm, beautiful....In fact, it brought to the surface all those Northwesterner tendencies: What!? it is sunny! Go outside! stay there... etc.. sitting and reading inside on a day like it was on Sunday seems... just wrong.


Luckily, Jim sent me a text and invited me along with a group to go for a coffee; when your friends text you to go and enjoy a coffee, especially if it is a location where you get to sit under trees like those pictured below, you say: "OK!" Close those texts for just one afternoon and run around outside...After a soy latte, the five of us headed toward a quite large park, Roundhay Park...

Unfortunately, my camera batteries died right after I took this picture, the two preceding were taken at the Starbucks. However, from this one picture of the visitor center sign, we learn that there are many attractions at Roundhay Park: (from right to left) they have deer, leaves, people jumping really high so as to click their heels, monuments, and seashells. super.

I captured the colors of leaves, images of the castles of the park and little blond children (of which there was a disproportionately large amount) running through massive green fields... in my heart. Hopefully I will have a chance to return to Roundhey Park with charged batteries, but these sunny fall days are few and far between...

Days like Sunday, I think, are what Edna St. Vincent Millay illuminates in her poem, God's World. Sometimes, I feel so overwhelmed by nature's beauty, and they say that a picture is worth a thousand words... for me, this poem communicates (at least) a hundred pictures. haha. In all seriousness, this poem encapsulates, and expresses for me the emotion I feel walking or running through a crisp fall morning...

God's World
By: Edna St. Vincent Millay


O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, -- Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, -- let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.