Autumn is Here

Lightning dances upon the mountain top, swirling through the trees like a drunken reveler careening from partner to partner. Thunder, the ancient god of war, explodes all around, bursting into nooks and crannies, filling the air with dread.

This may well have been the last full blown thunderstorm storm of the season, and Mother Nature wanted me to remember her wrath. She wants it to haunt me through the sparkling, jewelled shades of her autumn. She wants me to think of it whenever I see the delicate snowflakes of winter and the fragile blooms of spring. She wants me to remember. I won’t forget.

This morning, the sky looks autumnal, and the last of the cold front may fire up again later this afternoon, but this was the season-changing weather I'd been waiting for. It wouldn't have needed to arrive with such a bang, but the cabin and the dogs and the cats and I survived. I had over 2" of rain in less than an hour. Wind roared through. The cabin was pelted with--was that hail? No, actually, it wasn't hail. It was the huge, fat acorns the oak trees produced this year hitting the side of the cabin as they were ripped from the trees. I don't think they cracked any of my windows, but I will need to check on that to be sure. The cats hid under the sofa and the bed. Dog dogged my heels all evening. If I stopped, he ran into me. If I turned around, I stepped on him. Baby Dog slept through it all.

I dodged downed limbs and branches as I drove from the cabin this morning. Leaves are thick on the road, if not precisely yet a carpet. Yellow is soon going to be the predominant color around me. The color change seems to have moved forward overnight by leaps and bounds. The odd thing is that I'm finding trees where the right half is red or yellow and the left half still green. The change isn't showing up tree by tree, it's more like branch by branch. I'm starting to take a few photos of that, and I will start posting some of these half-changed trees soon.

Happy Autumn! It's here.