It's time for that colorful Yankee from up north, wearing a coat of red and gold leaves, to come courting again. The orchestra is already swinging, with the north wind playing fiddle.

We can count on fall's arrival just as another year finishes its chores. The grain is in the bin. Winter gardens of collards, sweet, tender and green, await the first frost to set the sugar. Bluefish and spots are running, the evenings are cooling, and foggy mornings are wet with dew that glints like millions of fairy gems in a rising sun.

Hunters are happy, with dove season full under way. It won't be long till the first frost brings hog killing time, meaning smoke-house hams and bacon. There'll be fatback and pot liquor, hounds on the trail and woods filled with the brilliant day-glow of deer hunters' orange competing with the falling leaves' colors.

We're told that autumnal colorations are simply a matter of the lifeblood of the leaves, chlorophyll, shutting down for the season. When the flow of chlorophyll ceases, ever-present carotenoid pigments, within tiny structures called plastids, provide brilliant yellows and oranges to tint the leaves of hickories, ash, maple, yellow poplar, aspen, birch, black cherry, sycamore, cottonwood, sassafras and alder. And there are anthocyanins, which break down the sugars to produce the reds and purples found in some maples, oaks, sourwood, sweetgum and dogwood.

The brighter the days, the cooler the nights, and the more vivid the colors.

When nature begins to don her gown of orange and scarlet, and the orchestra strikes up "Golden Days," another waltz of the seasons has begun.

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