Seasonal

Autumn is Wyoming's best season. They're all good, but fall is the jewel in the crown. Last winter was a long one, lasting into June, and I hardly remember spring. Spring was full of Grandpa dying, hospitals and hopeful emails, the weekly winding pilgrimage to Salt Lake. I vaguely recall the snow melting and piles of last fall's frozen decay steaming in the sunshine. Then just as suddenly there was summer grass; there were veils of violet petunias on Jo's back porch, Austrian copper roses spilled fire-hued blossoms into the alleys and onto windshields, and the cottonwoods snowed cotton until the air was so thick you couldn't breathe. Hollyhocks, tulips, marigolds and pansies, crabapple trees like popcorn balls in pink and white, geraniums in window boxes, profusions of wildflowers and diaphanous blue flax along the highway. But our summer heat never attained that permeating, baking quality this year; it just never got too hot. You don't go anywhere in Wyoming without a jacket anyhow, but this year it was necessary. It rained about once a week, usually for two or three days at a time, and not just the light, sporadic summer rain that leaves everything refreshed and green and bright. It was drenching rain, the kind that instantly darkens the sky and causes flash floods in the street, replete with bone-rattling thunder and lightning so close you can smell the ozone, so bright your eyes sting. Sometimes the rain became consistent, pea-sized hail that temporarily covered the ground. Occasionally there were periods of misty, soft rain, which was heavenly, but mostly it was new windshield wipers once a month. When the mercury hit 35F one night in late August, we knew summer had given up the ghost. Forecasters started predicting snow at higher altitudes, and the rain went from cooling to uncomfortable. Still, all that wet with no heat to dry us out caused things to bloom longer, and I don't mean sustained prettiness of flowerbeds. I mean sagebrush attained new and fantastic heights of allergen production, ragweed and milkweed and who knows what-all-else. Grasses and shrubs growing unchecked out there in the desert, releasing tiny bits of pollen and fiber into the air, moss and mold multiplying in the unseen dark under porches, between walls, under rocks and fences and hedges. Let me just say that this was a good year for allergy medication producers and the doctors that prescribe their products.

The snow hasn't come yet, and I'm praying for a long, mild fall, with gentle days and cool nights. I love sweater weather and the first whiffs of woodsmoke and burning leaves the colors of jewels like amber, rubies and smoky quartz, colors like red wines and deep brown or golden ales and polished copper and brass. I love crunchy brown grass and the sun leaning so far south that all shadows seem longer than any other time of the year. Fall means Halloween and the growing anticipation of the holiday season, the last and best of the fresh fruit and vegetables, pantries full of new cans and jars of jam and preserves. Kitchens are pungent with boiling fruit, the bitter grass smell of haying season finally settles into a mellow, dusty barn smell as the mammoth rolls sit aging in fields like fuzzy boulders. It's the last time to enjoy bare, dry sidewalks and sunny porches. Fall is just perfect. Kids are back in school and out of the public way, road construction wraps up, activities go from outdoors-y and exhausting to indoor, lazy and rich. Wildlife and stock move to winter feed grounds and hunting season starts. Hunting season means armies of people in camoflage, truck beds full of dogs and tarps with various horns and hooves poking out, and air full of jerky smoking and fresh sausage and roasts. Meat is a good thing.

Plus fall is for pumpkins, and I love pumpkins and orange and anything else that has to do with them, including, and especially, jack-o-lanterns and pie.