The feeling of an icy finger running down my back wasn’t due to a thrilling mystery book. It was due to my opening the back door this morning. Cold! Frost decorates the roofs of my neighbors’ houses. The thermometer plummeted to thirty-one degrees.
Yesterday’s wind blew the leaves into funny swirls and patterns. The driveway is blown clear in one place and piled high in another. It was a capricious wind, having fun on a nippy autumn day that was wet and drizzly one moment, not the next. Weather is ever changing.
We are funny creatures. Nature’s plan is for the leaves to fall each autumn and carpet the ground, warming it, making new soil, and what do we do? We bag them, cart them off, leaving the ground bare and unprotected. But then, that’s just a minor inconsistency. We humans have many more.
It is amazing to me, that the same leaves that were once an exuberant green, then orange and gold are now a crisp, pale shadow of their former glory. Is it a touch of frost that does this or the absence of chlorophyll or the shortening hours of daylight? Leaves change, nature rearranges things but with all the change, there is a consistency, a pattern about the seasons. When the wind turns icy and the leaves turn loose, it’s a signal for me to light the fireplace, keep the coffee pot going, be sure I have a warm coat somewhere back in the closet, and enjoy it.
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