Autumn Musings

I love fall!  Colorful leaves that decorate the trees for a while and then crunch under your feet after they fall.  The perfect combination of warm sunshine and crisp air.  Drizzly days that make you just want to curl up with a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate.  Pumpkins and gourds, apple cider and caramel apples.  Small town festivals and parades.  Chilly nights and frosty mornings.  Harvest - watching the farmers gather in what they've spent all growing season hoping and laboring for.  It's like poetry leaps off the page and becomes visual, palpable, tangible.

One autumn event that I always look forward to is a bonfire.  Hot dogs and marshmallows skewered on sticks and slowly browning over the hot coals.  Smoke from the fire that always blows in your direction no matter how many times you move to avoid it.  Sitting on hay bales or benches or stumps around the fire.  Sharing stories and laughs with friends as you all turn this way and that trying to distribute the fire's heat evenly over the different parts of your body.  Eating ordinary food that somehow tastes better just because of the occasion.  Gazing up at the stars and realizing that you're just a tiny little part of something so much bigger and being glad that you know, in a measure, what it's really all about.

Ardith and I smile down from our "thrones" in the back of the pickup on the way to our first (and only so far) bonfire of the season.

A lovely evening

Prairie grasses with a harvested field in the background

Shadows of three Macon homecoming parade watchers

(Jill Anderson, Ardith and me)

The band float

One of our young friends is playing the clarinet.

Some of fall's beauties