Requiem for a Short and Staggered Season

The first of three photo albums featuring the best of autumn in Monte Vista, Colorado, this year.

Autumn sneaks up on us here in the San Luis Valley. At first, mid-August, you’ll see what trees and shrubs there are out here turn bright red. Soon a few random shocks of bright yellow appear on a limb of aspen or poplar.

All of a sudden the things that turn red, turn red.

I have no idea what this is, other than red, and next to the Colorado blue spruce.

These photos make a convincing claim for the season not being a total wash, but, sadly, this is the second year in a row an October windstorm stripped the trees before the colors peaked. I had originally titled this post “Requiem for a Neglected Season” because I’d felt I’d missed it, as preoccupied as I’d been with writing my novel and various household matters. 

Looking at these photos, I realize I did witness beauty. I just wasn’t paying attention beyond framing the shots. Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine if I feel I missed something, because I didn’t. The pictures tell the tale.

Love my September glories, a.k.a. alpine asters. Like hollyhocks, they’re pretty and pretty tough.

It’s only occurred to me over the last couple of years that I could get down to the ground for an alternate perspective. I’m slow, but I expect to be master class...should I live to 101.

Everything had my attention enough to take photographs. There is no light like October light, and I wasn’t letting this much get away from me.

Such light can lend drama and dignity to a vacant lot. Not that I’m testing that theory. I just like the way it looks through the tangle of vegetation around the wrecked cyclone fence here.

Another cyclone fence, more amber butterscotch light, more leaves.

The light is at once sad, as you can tell it’s faded from its summer blaze. Yet we’re all happy and energized because it’s not so doggone hot anymore. Also, pretty.

These were as good as it got for the poplars. We had mere days to enjoy them.

Even the walk home from the liquor store is a thing of beauty where I live.

It turns out I have enough photos for a couple of more posts, including a Halloween special. I might as well clear my desk. Winter isn’t coming to the San Luis Valley. It was here as of Halloween. Let’s hope we get plenty of snow.

The gray overtakes the golds and reds soon enough.

All photographs Copyright © 2019 Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

Summer’s Survivors of the Frosts

I’m walking past these guys in mid-October and thinking, “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, you’re lovely and all, but—what are you still doing here?”

The alpine aster is also known as a September glory because that’s the month you generally see the most of ‘em. This little guy must have been left to stand guard while his brothers and sisters went to sleep. He wasn’t the only one, either. There are still a few outliers to be found if you look.

Hollyhocks are among the toughest botanical beauties you’ll ever meet, given how they can grow tall and study from a seam in a sidewalk while blooming to shame the angels. Here, along US 160 on the west side of town, we behold the toughest of them all. They’re normally long gone by the end of September, but don’t tell this one. I’ve got a feeling it will punch you.

This one’s having a hard time letting go. It’s okay; I don’t take change very well, either.

There are tractor-trailer loads of crabapples still in the trees. I can only imagine what the sidewalks will look like next spring. We can all only hope there’s enough precipitation to help wash all the mess away.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

More October in Monte, 2018 Edition

I’d meant to fill this space with reflections on where I am regarding my various writing projects. Those are indeed forthcoming, but meanwhile these photo essays are just too easy to do when you’ve,  a) got a lot of great photos, and, b) got a lot of great photos.

It’s not the same pattern as 2017 or 2016, but it is a pattern to itself, with distinguishing glitches.

The dawn was already colored by the heavy cloud cover as it broke with the slow passing of the front, but the cold-burned leaves certainly added their hue here.

In A.D. 2018, the autumn pattern in our patch of the San Luis Valley is broken cloud cover, with wind in the afternoon. It’s yet to get bitterly cold (below 20°F/-6.6°C), although it has gotten cold enough to turn the gold leaves on our aspen to deep red and black, while also rusting the leaves of the tall Lombardy poplars. 

After a while, the gold does come through to catch virtual fire with the rising sun.

From one of the more spectacular sunsets this month. You usually don’t catch this kind of bronze-to-orange light anytime other than August. 

Although the cold nights have the luster of the changed leaves, it could be worse. Last year, we had a heavy, wet snow of the kind that we’re already overdue for in the Colorado high country. The snow melted, then refroze on the leaves and branches, effectively bringing an end to leaf-viewing season before Halloween.

To add insult to injury, that was the only snow we had all season long. With luck, the end of the current La Niña cycle should help break this drought.

Every season of every year has its own personality. Some are more agreeable than others. I got some nice pictures from this one, and some trees have yet to fully change. 

Snow would be good, though. Any day now....

Ice crystals in the upper troposphere create this prisming effect commonly know as a “sun dog.” The moisture is up there. We just need to get it down here.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved. Virtual coffee and doughnuts gratefully accepted via PayPal.

A Bumper Crop of Crabapples (Not Cherries)

...but they were this big and red and...ah, never mind. I learned a couple of things, though.

This is the end of the third summer I’ve seen here in Monte Vista, and I don’t remember this many cherries...well, I just learned they’re not cherries. Although there are a surfeit of cherry trees about town, most of them “ornamental” as opposed to functional (this should have been my first clue, come to think of it), what I saw were crabapples. Given the traffic this site gets when I post photos from around town, I am mortified beyond mortification.

There’s nothing to do but update and correct and move on. Something I was especially grateful to learn was the connection between a frost we had that inhibited the fruit-bearing of fruit-bearing trees. Our previous winter was exceptionally warm, so here we are. Aside from learning crabapples from cherries, it’s good to be reminded how much quirks in the weather can affect things.

I can’t explain why I was so taken by the sight of these along my customary walk. My best guess is it’s the contrast between the gentle roundness of the crabapples popping bold red against irregular surfaces. Like this red clay trail...

...among the green blades of grass...

...atop coarse gravel...

...lying vulnerable along a cool, unforgiving sidewalk.

Fortunately, they don’t stick to your shoes, because they can be difficult to avoid, especially on the west side of town.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

The Real Ghosts of Halloween

It’s by no means a profound thought, but it occurred to me this morning as I took the Halloween decorations back out to the garage that Halloween makes a good practice run for Christmas.

It’s the same setup. Decorations and candy and costumes are in stores nearly two months before the actual holiday. (The candy and other Halloween seasonal items appeared at my local Safeway in mid-August.) The movies and TV specials are hyped. Parties are thrown and attended. No gifts bought or given, though. This is the practice run.

Eventually, unless you’re one of the many young adults spending the actual night of the event getting inebriated while in costume, you might be home for the thing Halloween is actually about: three to four hours of waiting by the door for the trick-or-treaters to come.

I got all of two pages edited and a couple of lines of a poem started when the pen started drying out on me. (All four colors! Actually, it’s just a super-cheap pen I picked up for free at a job fair, so I got what I paid for.) Then it got too chilly to sit still, so I went inside.

What 31 October means as I get older: the dying light of a dying season, as the old year’s life fades into a long interregnum (at least here in Colorado) of cold, dry, brown death until next year’s life takes hold. Happy Halloween!

Like Christmas, these weeks of lead-up culminate in a few hours of actual observance on the special day. Halloween, with its 5 pm - 9 pm window for trick-or-treating, probably lasts longer than Christmas for most people, whose entire Christmas proper is less than one hour spent around the tree tearing the paper from presents, before wandering off to watch television.

It’s probably just me and maybe half a dozen other people, but I always feel a tinge of melancholy among the celebrations. I’m reminded of Halloweens past, when I used to escort my small children about our old north Colorado Springs neighborhood. I remember when that neighborhood used to be a lot quieter and friendlier, in happier, more stable economic times.

I’m over the hardest part, which is the crushing sense of irrelevancy one feels when one’s children no longer needs him to take them through the neighborhoods. Still....

I’ve been turning this around in recent years by reminding myself again that this is a fool’s despair spiral. Neighborhoods change. Everything changes. Children grow up, as well they should. We all grow old, if we’re lucky. 

“For soon all shall go dark.” Is that gothic enough for ya?

Halloween 2017 went quietly, as it did last year. We saw maybe all of ten trick-or-treaters, most of them small children. I would have liked to have seen more, but maybe that will change over the years. Everything else has.

And so we begin the run-up to Christmas. 

The large secondhand store along the main drag where I live traditionally closes the day before Halloween and opens a couple of days later in full Christmas mode. It’s the only place that does this in town that I know of, and it doesn’t come across quite as “Oh, dear, Christmas decorations right after Halloween!” obnoxious as one might think. It’s just what they do.

I’m blessed to live in a small town, without broadcast television leading us into the temptation of leaving the set on to blare commercials for whatever fad toys/gadgets/etc. the Lords of Commerce seek to promote this season. My wife will decorate the house accordingly after Thanksgiving, which is our tradition. We stand a good chance of having both our grown children home for the holiday.

“But first, we must enter through this door.” [*evil cackling laughter*]

You’d think this lack of external stimulation would slow the days down for us, but I’ve noticed it has the precise opposite effect. Charles Bukowski was right, as always, the days really do run like wild horses over the hills, so much so that my ghosts are falling behind me. As they should. The Good Old Days are now.

See you next year!

An Abbreviated Autumn, Part 2

...in which I’ve saved the best for last. The sun through these leaves makes for nature’s own stained-glass masterpiece. Over 50 years of these things for me, and they never get old....

All of the following photos were taken two days after the last post’s batch, which turned out to be the day before that night’s snowstorm and hard freeze that would kill what was left on the trees before it had a chance to change. Then came the winds....

One of the great pleasures of this short season was to come upstairs into the master bedroom in the late afternoon to see the sun blasting through the golden Lombardy poplar leaves through the west-facing windows there.

At the window with the screen pushed back.

Looking up at the same trees, but from down in the yard. There were no bad angles in this light.

Over on the west side of town, and now I notice the Lombardy poplars dominating this post. Although these trees are native to the regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea (hence the “Lombardy”), they were brought to this part of Colorado for use as windbreaks. Lombardy poplars grow tall and fast, and I’ve yet to see one break. The local forestry folk would rather people would stop planting them, as they supposedly have a relatively short life as trees go, but in an area where the wind comes at you as ruthlessly as it does on or along any mountains of respectable size, these trees are a godsend.

There’s never any sense in getting angry over the weather, but the relentless, bullying winds that came after to strip what was left all blew all sense from my door. I can handle the extreme cold, along with how my south-facing office bakes like a Dutch oven in the summer, but going outside only to get repeatedly slapped upside the skull and bodily shoved around wears on my nerves after a while. 

‘Tis the season. 

The Indian Summer that wound out the last full week of the month has made up for the unsettled week that came before. Although the remaining leaves are, for the most part, dull brown, they fell in a drips of one, two, and three all around. I want to say it sounded like crackling fire—that is the easiest analogy for the season of yellows and reds—but it was more like the slow drip after a wave has washed over. It proved very calming to stand out on the front porch and listen to this as the sun melted into the western horizon.