Chateau Lloyd

I've been pretty scarce around here, but I've got solid reasons: the weather is wonderful and we are at peak color.  Instead of staring at a screen, I've been taking long walks through the woods, visiting the shooting range and enjoying fall in general.

Put simply, I want to tune out politics, but it's impossible to go online and ignore it.  My solution: stay offline.

I'm at a loss to think of an autumn that had better weather.  Yes, we could do with some rain, but the days are warm, the nights are cool, and the sunlight on the leaves is magical.  The change of the colors, the fall of the leaves is simply enchanting.  A good storm will down them all overnight, but right now they just fall like intermittent snowflakes, softly drifting down.

As is our wont, yesterday the family set out to buy the Halloween pumpkins.  This could be easily accomplished at the local grocery store, but we like to just set off into farm country and see what we come across.  There are countless roadside stands at this time of year, offering cheap pumpkins in return for a leisurely country drive.  So it was yesterday, and we found a wagon full of excellent specimens at a farm some distance from town.  I love living in an area where people can pile up pumpkins, post a price list, and trust you put put the correct amount of cash in a metal box.  An interesting wrinkle on this is a scan to the owner's Venmo, clearly designed to cater to the Millennials and Zoomers.

This Gen Xer paid in cash.

As we drove, I saw three harvesters working the fields.  That's something else more people need to see.  A society that doesn't know where its food comes from is courting disaster.  I do love the sight of the corn and wheat being brought in, and hay bound up against the onset of winter.

Fall is about reflecting on the summer and anticipating the winter, which makes it the most complex of the seasons.  Summer and winter are pretty stagnant - late June can be just as stifling as early August, but early September always feels different from late October.

Autumn is unique and that's why I enjoy it so much.  It looks back to what was, and forwards to Advent and Christmas.

How can blogging compete with that?