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Autumn Is In the Air
My friends in Wyoming are posting photos of the fall scenery with the golden aspen leaves that ring the bottoms of the mountain ranges. Occasionally there will be a maple tree flashing red leaves that grab your attention like a police light. It would frequently snow as this month began, and then the snow would melt, and we’d have a few more weeks of Indian summer. I love autumn in the Rocky Mountains. I wrote this poem in my head 50 years ago while I was driving back to college after a weekend at home to help my little sisters with the milking so my dad could go elk hunting. I’ve illustrated it with photos from my friend’s cabin in those same mountains where I got the inspiration for the words.
Enter October
by Judy Kay Welch
Wrapped in the feather boa of
The Season’s Premier Snowstorm,
October makes her entrance.
But, after the introduction,
She drops the frozen front and gleams gold so bright
That wild geese echo the musical applause
Long after the last curtain call
That cuts into November’s icy act.
I love fall, but we are currently in second summer. We had false fall last week.
That’s hilarious!! Our saying about the part of Wyoming where I grew up (western…Rocky Mountains…6800 ft.) is that there were Two Seasons: Winter and Poor Skiing.
We have enjoyed a few of those Western Pennsylvania days where you could wish the weather could be like that year ’round. The leaves have a bit of a tint, but are mostly still green here. I think that orderly transitions of seasons only occur in story books. I have seen a chart similar to that Texas chart for Pennsylvania.
Beautiful poetry and pictures, Cow Girl.
When we lived in CO, it was “winter and July.”
Our son-in-law is not particularly fond of the fact that aspens (pretty much the only color-changing trees where they live in northern New Mexico) all change color at the same time. He misses the mix of colors in the different types of trees where he grew up in western Pennsylvania.
Oh, but they shimmer!