They're dying. Good. I need the rest

“Autumn’’ (1896), by Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha

"I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing."

- - Mark Van Doren (1894-1972, poet , critic and professor at Columbia University and long-time resident of Cornwall, Conn.). Cornwall is on the east bank of the Housatonic River in the midst of the mostly bucolic Litchfield Hills. Mr. Van Doren wrote a poem, “The Hills of Little Cornwall,’’ about the town in 1939. It starts:

“The hills of little Cornwall
Themselves are dreams.

The mind lies down among them,
Even by day, and snores....”

The Housatonic, by the way, is much cleaner now than when I lived near it in the ‘60s, when General Electric and other companies were pouring toxic chemicals into it upstream.

West Cornwall (part of Cornwall) Covered Bridge.

A sketch of Cornwall by John Warner Barber (1835) shows the buildings that had been used by the Foreign Mission School, to the right of the church at center. The school, which was only open in 1817-26, trained young foreign men to be Christian missionaries.