Giving up on Summer

I know summer has officially been over for a month or more, but I've been telling myself that as long as there's still a little green on the leaves outside, it's not really over. They've been yellow — maybe even predominantly yellow — for a while now. By tomorrow, I think I'll have to admit that the last faint tinge of green is finally gone.

The trees outside my window are mostly big leaf maples and vine maples. They're very pretty when the leaves turn gold in the fall. They really are. It's just that, even after 18 years in the Pacific northwest, I can't help comparing them to fall in Michigan.

Of course, fall in Michigan was invariably followed by winter in Michigan, which kept me from enjoying the fall spectacle when I lived there as much as I might have done. Since I no longer live there, and know I won't have to endure the beautiful but interminable Michigan winter, I find I'm quite nostalgic about this time of year.

In central Michigan we never got the jaw-droppingly spectacular color you get further north, but compared to the polite yellow that's outside my window right now, it was spectacular enough. This wasn't any place special, just the street in front of our house:

Of course, if you were willing to travel, the trees in the park at the end of our block were a little more colorful:

Since I didn't grow up in Michigan, I can only imagine how much fun it would have been to jump into a deep pile of crisp fall leaves. I didn't grow up in Seattle, either, which is probably just as well. Jumping into a soggy, wet, slug-infested pile of leaf slime is an experience I'm just as glad I missed.

Branching Out

Can't do it. My relatively-recently-developed obsession with family history feels like a different thing, and leaving it here, tossed in with everything else, just seems wrong, somehow. Besides, it offends my compulsion to have things neatly organized. This blog is already messy enough.

Mostly I'm learning to recognize the glazed look people get when I start off on a family-related tear.

So, henceforth, I'll be Stalking Dead People in a place I've set aside for the purpose. I call it Out on a Limb, and there's a link to it above. You can check it out if you're interested, or skip it if you're not. If you find it as engaging and fascinating as a textbook on advanced particle physics, well, you've been warned.

Everything else will go here. Dogs and books and living relatives and MS and whingeing about anything that strikes me as worthy of complaint. It will be as engaging and fascinating as it's ever been.

Well, you've been warned.