The orange and yellow season

Friday finds fall in full visual force. The tree leaves are still mostly clustered around, and tenuously clinging to, their branches. They simply couldn't be more colorful, as the ebbing chlorophyll gives way to the residual reds, oranges, and yellows. Afternoon sun rays limn these arboreal spectacles, a visual consolation for the rapidly shortening days and dropping temperatures.
Of course, none of this is visible during my morning commute in, when dark and cold predominate. Daylight doesn't arrive until well after I have arrived at the office and dug into work. But the afternoon drive home has been a top-down, (nippy) blue-sky, trees-on-fire delight most of this week.
Trees are not the only orange/yellow popping out at this time of season, of course. Carl Sandburg calls it SPOT on in his poem Theme In Yellow:

I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

This morning's drive in had another one of those wonderful soundtrack mixes that I wouldn't have thought to combine, but which played so well together. There is something about Madeleine Payroux's Lady Day-esque vocalization that fits a cold October morning, and any playlist that features the Guggenheim Grotto (really, if you haven't yet discovered this group you really should!) is bound to be a good one.
The full playlist:
- Madeleine Payroux: To Love You All Over Again
- Bruce Cockburn: Different When It Comes to You
- The Guggenheim Grotto: Just Not Just
- Bob Dylan: Everything is Broken
- The Fray: Enough For Now