Fall Ruminations

What’s a girl to do? The leaves are nearing their peak of color change, and I have little daylight time before and after work to take photos. The past two days were also overcast and the light hasn’t been very interesting, which even further limits what I’d hoped for with the photos. So I have only one option, as I see it—a play day! I’m off on Monday so I can rattle around the area and get some (I hope) good fall photos. As a result, you may not see any posting from me until Tuesday, and if I do happen to post on Monday when I get back from my mini-expedition it will be late.

Until then, the cabin is warm and cozy, and the windows are open again. The cicadas have gone back into hiding, but the crickets and tree frogs have replaced them. The good news is that those two are not as loud, so sitting outside on the deck after dark is pleasurable again. Baby Dog played hopscotch with one of the jumpers last night after dark. It was a small jumper but it was too dark for me to identify it properly. She sure looked funny, though.
Despite the increasing warmth this week, the fall color change is starting to move rapidly now. I can see changes from morning to evening. Migration seems to have slowed down again, but a front coming through tomorrow is likely to jumpstart that again. Although I’ve seen a few migrating flocks of waterfowl, I haven’t seen many. This may mean that they’ve taken another route this year—sometimes that happens—or it may mean they haven’t migrated in numbers yet.

I wonder if the warm temperature has the same effect on the birds and animals that it does on me. The air is calm and humid, and it’s easy to be lulled into a near somnolence, cocooned by the warmth around me. This is a different sensation than the drowsiness of mid-summer, which is dominated by attempts to avoid the heat. This is a more temperate drowsiness brought on by what feels like an equilibrium of the physical senses—no wind to ruffle the hair, temperatures neither hot nor cold, humidity that comforts rather than cloys. I feel like a sleepwalker floating through the forest, momentarily protected within this rare balance.