This past Sunday, my husband, our standard poodle, and I grabbed a bottle of wine and walked down to the meadow in our woodland neighborhood to watch the sunset. On the way down, I said that if you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t think it’s fall. My husband agreed that it was a warm day.
Actually, it was pretty chilly, as the sun was getting lower, but what I really meant was that where we live, it is difficult to spot any golden foliage unless we were to hike to the other side of our mountain. We are completely surrounded by evergreens of all kinds.
As we made our way to the bench thoughtfully placed in the meadow by one of our neighbors, and settled in to enjoy the view, I realized that it felt like fall, after all. I just had to pay attention to the little details. Fall was in the crispness of the air, the yellowing of the grasses, the angle of the sun and the time of day for the sunset. I could even see it in the eagerness of our standard poodle who was relaxing, while enjoying the cool moist ground beneath his belly.
With every icy wind gust, I got back that nostalgic feeling I get every time the seasons change: I start to remember winter. It’s coming, and I am sure it will be here much faster than expected, as it always is above 10,000 ft, but for now, we could sit on this bench and enjoy the calmness of watching the last rays of the sun fall behind the Sawatch range, and the darkness of the night set in.
