My body responds with slower metabolism (hibernation mode)
All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep
Clouds have taken away the sun and there is no light
Except when I open the refrigerator door
I stand soaking in the light and stuffing my face with anything I can find
As my girth grows so does my dark mood
And I wallow in my failures and go to sleep
I dream of sunny days
When the warmth of the sun shined on me
Inspiration filled my mind with poetry and
Excitement for a new flower or vegetable in my little garden
I could wait to eat because eating was second, even third
To experiencing the fascinating world outside
A new rose, a red tomato, a green jalapeno
And plucking lime green worms from my tomato plants
The hundreds, if not thousands of 13-year locusts
That climbed up from the ground
Crawling onto every plant, tree or post that stuck out of the ground
Their red bug-eyes and wet wings and bodies warming in the sun
Waiting to fly off, if only my dog, KT, didn\u2019t eat them first
Those days when inspirations came like whispers on the wind
Tickling my mind with such joy in the sun
Waking from the dream, there is still no sun
A cold wind blows across the fields
I look out the window and the pond is visible now
I can see it since the leaves have dropped from the trees
This view is a reason we bought this house
It is magnificent
The ducks fly over and land on the pond
They paddle around it in the evening light
And I watch as the clouds that cross the sky
Catch the light of the unseen setting sun
The colors are pink, orange, and dark blue-gray
Then a silver sliver of moon appears high in the sky
And I find myself in awe at the beauty of this painting
But then night falls
Darkness is here again but it comes with an expectation
To see the scene tomorrow so that I can go on
Into the darkness
Even into winter
Even into dark
Dark even into
Into dark even
Into
Dark
Even into dark<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/AdobeStock_WINTER-LEAF.jpeg\")
<\/a>Late Fall by Doll Russell I sink into darkness around the time of fallMy body responds with slower<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":135575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[7078,27522,27523,5,4,4782,3,7570],"class_list":["post-135573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-writing","tag-creative-writing","tag-doll-russell","tag-late-fall","tag-mississippi","tag-oxford","tag-poetry","tag-the-local-voice","tag-winter-reading-issue"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/TLV-Cover-433-WRI-WEB-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1536&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135577,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135573\/revisions\/135577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}