A brief stopover in Autumn

Not a heck of a lot of spare time today. Unfortunately the reality of actually spending a holiday at home is a frantic rush to play catch-up with life when you return.

Nonetheless, I am glad to have finally taken the initiative to get home for Thanksgiving. I'm tired of pretending that there aren't certain days where family matters just that little bit more. It was refreshing to just relax and be with them, without the normal pressures of trips back, in which every one with whom you had a semblance of a relationship with at some point in your adolescence wants to do coffee.

The other pleasant surprise was a sudden envelopment in autumn. A rainy metropolis doesn't capture the spirit of the fall quite the same as does a small mountain town. Not only was this the first Thanksgiving I'd spent at home in six years, but it was the first time I'd returned home during the fall at all during that time. I'd forgotten the multicoloured streaks highlighting the hills, the crispness of the air that seemed to be that much more full of oxygen, the golden tint of the sunlight.

Fortunately, we were able to stay a day after the Thanksgiving hubbub and take a brief trip out of town to appreciate the outdoors. Unfortunately, my camera battery died soon after we left, though I was able to capture a few shots.







After a trip to a nearby small town, where the last two pictures were from, we went for a brief hike amist a giant cedar forest. The trees were so enormous that the four of us, with our arms outstretched, couldn't reach around them. The woods were scattered with dessicated devil's club.

This reminded me of how a childhood friend once told me you could only be pricked by a devil's club a certain number of times in your lifetime. Once you reached that exact number of stings, you would drop dead near instantaneously due to the poison's profound effects.

It then struck me how refreshing it was that the urban myths of my youth were more likely to be about aspects of the natural world than about kidnappers and other such predators.