~;;~ game day and stormy weather: pt 1 ~;;~

I have spent weeks now with the camera glued to my face.  But the storms have come in, and autumn leaves do not weather weather, so soon enough I’ll stop.  Will you hate it if I keep posting what I’ve got?  Because I can’t, even now, stop being amazed.  When the rains come, the trunks turn so dark, and the leaves that remain are so bright against them.  Like the Lord is saying,

“These are the uses of adversity.”

I unwittingly parked over a drain in the parking lot at church today.  You’d think a drain could be lucky and dry – but it wasn’t.  I couldn’t have centered my door more precisely if I’d been trying.  When I got home, the pups were oversaturated mudballs, but my shoes no longer cared.

Front view from my bedroom window.

The stairs light is on.  I should have turned it off for this to show you how, once the storms moved in night before last, the world  has gone dark and wet.  See how shadowed is the room I’m standing in?  The shot was taken at noon.

This week, we watched the Rangers games.  The house I left behind (on my way to university and my own life’s journey) is about five minutes from the stadium down there in Texas, and my sister, who still lives there, has connected deeply and enthusiastically with this team.  So we watched with her and screamed and yelled and did my niece’s laundry (up here for college), and it was like a family reunion—except that we were five or six states away (does Texas count as only one state?) from my sister and her other kids.  GO RANGERS.  Now, for the first time since the LA Dodgers were our home team and we danced to the dulcet tones of Vin Scully, we will care who takes the World Series.

Every autumn is different.  And Autumn up the mountain is different from the one in the valley.  They say it all depends on the moisture levels and the temperature peaks and valleys.  Some years are good for the reds, some for the golds, some for orange, but hardly ever do all three do well at the same time.   And every year, when I see our yard, I have said, “I wish the red creeper and the yellow box elders and aspens would turn at the same time.”  Evidently, this is that year.  Stunning.

Nature justifies a lurpy metal gate.

And every day brings change.  The trees behind have still to go bright gold, here.  But the ones in front – they’ve exploded like fireworks.  Tomorrow, the colors will have shifted again, and every minute the light changes. I can’t stop looking for fear I’ll miss something.  (Is this like making you look at pictures of my grandchildren? I’m actually going to do that, too, very soon.)

The next day, we got together with our own kids and watched the BYU football game.  Maybe I should start buying jerseys.  I feel extremely !Rah-rah!, which just makes fall all the more fun.