Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

Today is Thursday, October 17th, 2024.

And today's poem is necessitated by a localized meteorological phenomenon.

It is James Whitcomb Riley's When the Frost is on the Punkin.

And this is a poem I read compulsively every year around this time.

I grew up in the Northwest, and I now live in the Florida Panhandle.

So the weather is very different, and I've had to adapt the way that I track the changing of the seasons and the development of the year.

In the Northwest, you might be able to tell that autumn is coming on when the leaves begin to change.

But I always had a more subjective metric.

Autumn was coming on for real, you knew, when flannel sheets became comfortable. In Florida,

flannel sheets are never comfortable, but the true advent of autumn is usually noticeable because

socks become comfortable in bed. Often, it's too warm to wear socks to bed. Uh, but there comes a time when

there's a chill on the air and the temperature drops below such and such a point in the evening. And,

uh, you know that it's time. Put on some, some warm long socks before you tuck in.

And we have just had that evening.

And so it is indisputably, albeit subjectively, time for when the frost is on the pumpkin.

Riley is one of these mid-19th century figures, sort of like a Mark Twain, a homespun, self-made

man of letters. He left school early, bounced around the country doing odd jobs, including

traveling by wagon with a minstrel show before settling down, putting down roots in a big city and writing for several major newspapers

and churning out several collections of poetry as well.

But this poem is the seasonally appropriate expression of James Whitcomb Riley,

a little rumbly, a little rambly.

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