N.E. INDIAN SUMMER

Each year, Nature prepares us by throwing a frost or two...just enough to kill off most of the flowers and just enough to send us racing to batten down the winter hatches. Then Mother Nature teases us with Indian Summer, just as we are about to put on the winter longjohns.

This picture shows the wonderful, sunny-yellow color of leaves before the world turns more or less colorless for the winter, when we imitate the black and white of the Ascot Race in My Fair Lady.

Are our recent milder winters foretelling the reality of global warming? Those of us who experience S.A.D. have had our light boxes in use for several weeks. Most people by now have had a flu shot and we await the first fall of snow. People are planning Thanksgiving, a time for many families to get together. Before we have digested that meal, the crush of preparing for Christmas will be upon us. The middle class will not be buying $100,000. diamond dog collars this year though there may be some out there who can afford to do that while so many children in the country are malnourished.

I'd like to think, since Obama was elected, of the new political climate of America as the Indian Summer of our government, warmer and more suggestive of what it can be like after the long economic winter we have barely survived.