What will fall call forth?

One of central Texas’s answers to the title question is Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani.
All these pictures are from the morning of September 25th along Orleans Dr.*

Like people, individual Maximilian sunflower flower heads can vary a lot,
so here’s another one in the same colony for comparison:

* Orleans Dr. is a neighborhood street without a neighborhood. That southeast Austin street and adjacent ones were once lined with houses, but nearby Onion Creek has flooded often enough to make living there untenable. A few years ago the city government bought out the homeowners and had the houses torn down. Google has only partly caught up to that reality. Here’s a correctly houseless view showing where I photographed the Maximilian sunflowers. At the same time, here’s a view that incorrectly shows houses that are now ghosts.

And let that be a lead-in to a quotation for today: “Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.” — Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman