Fall is in the Air...

For the first time I am watching a season change day-to-day in this place, Northern New Mexico.  The birds aren't singing as they used to in the mornings... most have flown on.  The morning air was suddenly crisp early last week.  Chamisa is starting to flush yellow in the high desert. 

Sunflowers against a barbed wire fence, framed against a blue sky, were in my field of vision looking west from Taos. 

Don't you come to know the seasons and the sequence of time and change where you are?  Which leaves turn first, which colors on certain trees that signal these cycles?  These are comforting reminders that life has an order and flow in spite of our own schedules, priorities, goals and plans.  Or changes of our own.

These Taos sunflowers reminded me of the late summer/early fall in Oklahoma, many years ago now. In my mind they connect this place to that one and I remember setting two children in a field of them to save the moment on tri-x black and white film. Two children who hadn't yet started school.  Black and white sunflowers?

Stop and smell the season change, swallow the air, touch the last lingering bit...of summer.

Comments

[Eva]

Fall is my favorite season so I am excited. Still hot here, though, but leaves are falling.

[The Atavist]

I love fall but don't like so much the fact that winter is next. Love that photo!

[carron hardin]

I, too, love fall...love the clothes, the events-football, Thanksgiving, leaves, Octoberfest-ivals, the break from the heat. It starts with going back to school...even when I don't have little ones to buy #2 pencils for anymore-the memories of everything new in your plastic zipper pencil case in your three ring notebook/binder. Remembrances of fall in the Amish country of Lancaster, Pennsylvania...the BEST ever place for fall. Football games, especially college football games-Texas-OU as a student myself, Univ. of Arkansas vs. anyone as my child now goes to college. Memories of a fall day, meandering down Canyon Rd. in Santa Fe while the aspens rustled and twinkled their yellow leaves in the breeze. The smell of chiles roasting and pinon wood burning in fireplaces, as I leave work at night. Acorns. New chile ristras on my iron gate. The home and hearth season. Gotta love it.

[allison]

Don't forget the aspen trees as they turn their shimmering colors. Hurry Fall, we are all ready!