The Best Season

Autumn is a funny season. I feel like I spend more time trying to be aware of the changes than any other season. I don't want to miss it--I feel like one week, it's hot, and then before you can blink the leaves are all on the ground and you resign yourself to looking at skeletal trees for the next six months. It seems to be everyone's favorite season, yet it's so short-lived.

A couple of weeks ago, when Tyler was in Virginia playing with The Habit on their weekend mini-tour, I took the Metro-North train upstate a little ways to see the trees. I got a good seat on the Hudson River side.

There were a few leaves changing, and these phone pictures don't do it justice.

The Hudson River valley is so beautiful, it's hard to imagine it's only a few miles out of Manhattan! My appreciation for New York (not the city) grows more and more each time I travel within it. All the small towns and history...

In the little town I stopped at, I spent most of the afternoon in a state park. This park preserved an area that 1,200 Continental soldiers camped in during the Revolutionary War. They built five barracks and had a lookout on the top of the hill for British troops. The British troops came in anyway and Occupied Fort Hill--Continental soldiers withstood a three-day assault from the British as they attacked from a neighboring hill.

I sat on a big clump of granite rocks and imagined soldiers crawling through the woods like ants. I saw old stone foundations and wondered if they were from the old barracks, or if maybe my imagination was just running away from me. They looked like they could've been, though ;-)

Part of me still marvels that I live in a place where the history goes back to the beginning when the United States was a baby. Before this I lived in a place that wasn't even a US state until 1912, and then I lived in a place that was traveled and founded by pioneers and immigrants in the 1800s.

When my afternoon was over, I waited on the train platform and looked at the hills, river, and trees for as long as possible, drinking it all in with my eyes to store in my Inner Nature Reserve.

 And then, last week, it was fall. Full-on, bright-yellow-carpet-of-leaves fall.

 And this week, as if all the trees planned it, the leaves fell, and just like that, autumn is coming to an end.

Sad!

Goodbye, my favorite season, I loved you, you lasted longer than I expected. I welcome winter begrudgingly.