September and Yellow Leaves

So… if they say in May that “Spring has sprung”, what do they say in September? “Fall has fallen?” “Autumn has got ‘em?”

Whatever ‘they’ say, the season of apples and pumpkins and yellow leaves is slowly but surely taking over here. I look out my window and even the flame trees—I call them that because last year they turned a fiery red and orange—are starting to change color. It won’t be long before the leaves can be raked up into piles for kids to jump into. Man, I miss doing that. My sisters and I used to rake the neighbors’ yard too, and then we’d have enough leaves to jump out of the maple tree into or bury each other standing up.

It’s incredibly hard to get the resulting knots out of one’s long hair afterwards, by the way.

Right now, I guess “late summer” or “Indian summer” fits better than “fall” as a descriptive term. All day we’ve had a breeze blowing, warm but hurried. It has sent every imaginable kind of cloud—other than funnel—through the valley: high, wispy cirrus; puffy and decorative cumulus; dark gray rainclouds, and fog.

I love late summer—that last holdout before fall sets in, when warm temperature still holds but change is in the very air. I love fall too; a last chance to fill up on color before the winter sets in and turns everything gray.

I hate the gray. Some gray is okay. Gray everything is not.

This year, I’m going in armed. I’m prepared to look for color, to gather it about me, to enjoy it wherever I see it. Maybe that’s why I fill my room with houseplants: the peace lily that Terry chopped half the leaves off last year, the dragon tree I found in Walmart and couldn’t resist, the poinsettia I’ve had for at least three Christmases already. My plants would make a good blog-post by themselves.

Ah well. For now, I’m off for a lovely drive through the changing colors. Life is beautiful right now—a gift I don’t dare not to enjoy.