What a landscape I see on our balcony! It looks like a great subject for a painting. Fiery chrysanthemums sit pompously in zinc pots and wooden troughs. They are flanked by heavy, anti-Halloween-looking pumpkins. They are no longer the babies that last year modestly visited our balcony vegetable garden. They have grown and matured. A cord of firewood, which is neatly, billet along billet, stacked up in the midst of all this fall-scented luxury, looks like it is feeling cold, so it has thickly covered itself with tufts of dry grass... The entire scene is so beautiful.
I feel myself so well here, it being so cozy. The only issue is the need to occasionally blow warm air under my collar and rub my shoulders… After all, this country is far from Africa.
Nature is harvesting its bounty and generously sharing its colors with us, while we, being creative people, dispose of it all to the best of our abilities.
As part of this effort, we have resolved to carefully “pack” our vegetable garden in our proprietary verbal and photographic package, enabling us to send it then to all corners of the country, where our friends know and expect Den. Let you share our beauty a little, to better remember this fall and us, your Den!
The photo of our balcony garden was taken not by your regular amateur, but by winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Den’s Photo Exhibition Mykola Tymchenko. Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna literally caught him outside our office (after all, the star of press photography is not that easy to meet – I am just kidding, of course), and almost dragged him by the sleeve onto the balcony:
“Take pictures!”
“Of what?”
“Everything! You will sort it out later!”
Something like this dialog took place on the balcony then.
Is it laughable? Often it is a fact of life for a reporter! Sometimes the information flow is so strong, or comes so suddenly that one is permanently overwhelmed by it. One should then work – write, film, take photos – for a future sorting out.
Tymchenko’s photo story’s eventual fate unfolded in this way as well, as fine illustrations on an editorial scanner became the impetus for this brief essay on the balcony and October...
While writing it, I remembered that we have only a week left in October! That is all. The second month of fall will then pass the baton to its last and coldest month. And then, winter will come!
However, we would like the warm weather to last, allowing our heating systems to stay idled for longer, so that the Russian leadership would choke on their gas in their Zavidovo villas. We would also like land in the trenches to remain frost-free for longer, as in a few days, the volunteers will supply our boys at the front with winter footwear and clothing... Just a few days...
This fall ... I want to find warmth. Fortunately, it can always be found in Den: in the print version as well as online and in books, and even at the editorial office’s balcony “vegetable garden.”
May your fall be warm, dear friends, we wish warmly at Den!
