I know, I know, I've been totally post-less these last two months. I'm not even entirely sure where all the time went, but between road trips to Chicago/St. Louis/Champaign/Kentucky and trying to get out and enjoy the autumn weather, we've been two busy bees.

Nick went through his four-week "refresher" course and is now in the thick of the fall quarter, which means exams and problem sets and all of those things that make me cringe and have kept him in the computer lab well into the evenings. I would tell you about his classes, but even thinking about engineery things like MatLab make me fall asl........... *snort**cough*.... huh? Did I just lose consciousness?

Recently, I've been keeping myself busy by heading out and about to scout out good fall color. This season is, apparently, a lot less intense and A LOT later for color than usual (or so the local news people tell me); a 2-year-long drought and mild summer supposedly have something to do with that. I dunno ... we've been here 2 months and have seen more rain than would have fallen in 2 decades in San Diego, so "drought" sounds suspicious to me. Don't get me wrong - the rain has been really pleasant, and I'd almost forgotten about Mother Nature's Free Car Wash Service, but there's a part of me that misses hearing the tap-tap-tap of the raindrops on our roof. And no, the pound-pound-pound of our upstairs neighbors' kids doesn't count. Seriously. We're in an old industrial building. Even acknowledging that not all of the floors in this building are concrete like ours ... the sounds are akin to living below a bowling alley. Thankfully, the kids only live there part-time and Nick and I choose to find it amusing.

Anyway. Rain. After starting this post mid-week and only getting back to it now, the weather has changed from 73 degrees and sunny to RAINY (see, Ohio? Drought?! Suspicious!!!). I'm worried that this storm system was bad enough to bring down all of the beautiful leaves that were waiting for me in Clifton Gorge State Park, John Bryant Nature Reserve, and Buck Creek State Park, all of which were on my roster for this week and weekend. However, I'm thankful that I did get out to Cox Arboretum (one of our local Metroparks) and Caesar Creek State Park while the weather held.

Cox Arboretum is a lovely park located not so far from the recently closed GM plant in Moraine and was only a 20 minute drive from our place. There is an educational center and landscaped grounds, but the vast majority of the park is accessed by several miles of well-groomed walking paths that wind through the woodland. One of the things that has impressed me about Dayton is the system of urban Metroparks that provide a respite of green and natural among the suburban sprawl that connects Dayton to numerous small towns within a 30-minute drive from the city center.

Mid-day at Cox Arboretum was marked by harsh light (which typically makes for unappealing pictures) so I headed into the woods. Being late October, I was surprised by how much green remained in the wooded areas, and as the paths wound deeper and the canopy closed in, it seemed that the only trees touched with color were the tallest or most remote. From a wanderer's eye, it was a kaleidoscope of color touched by the kind of sadness that autumn brings; there is a subconscious knowledge of the coming winter, a smiling grief at the beauty of dying and the smell of decaying leaves, and that foreboding feeling that the moments are fleeting and should be embraced. It's telling, isn't it, that every child who grew up with a yard full of crunchy, colorful leaves has the SAME memory of raking those leaves into a HUGE pile (taller than ME, mom! Taller than the PORCH, dad!) and then taking running, bounding, joyful leaps into those piles. These memories are warm, soft, cozy ... which, when you think about it from the point of view of the adult who had to actually rake the cold dead pointy leaves, is ironic. But I think that even as children, we know that autumn is something magical and something to be cherished, even more than the blooms of spring or the pool weather of summer. It's change and progress, an evolution of time, in Mother Nature's most striking example.

Okay, where was I? Oh yes. Walking through the woods of Cox Arboretum was a beautiful and tranquil experience, but it seemed that all of the colorful trees were tucked behind the "plain" green ones that had not yet received the "Hello, there, it's OCTOBER!" memo ... or they were grouped together in a totally unphotogenic way. Just as disappointment started to mount, I came into a clearing that was utterly surrounded by trees bearing bright yellow leaves.



It was right about this point where I started focusing my attention upward to the canopy, and I was mesmerized by the layers of color. There were touches of green, the bright sunny yellows, and hints of flame orange that morphed into blazing red tones as the leaves fluttered and the sun shifted behind wisps of cloud. Assuring myself that poison ivy is one of the first plants of autumn to shed its leaves (whether or not this is actually true), I ventured off-path and flopped down on my back to get a view to the sky. I know that there are few places left in the United States that have even one square foot of absolute silence, but a Blackhawk helicopter could have flown past me right then and I may not have noticed: all I heard was the rustling of the leaves in the canopy and the crunching of the fallen ones under me as I rifled through my pack to get my camera.



A little farther along the path, there was a small break in the canopy, and my imagination read it as a ring of fire broken by one insolent tree that just refused to change color! Why do two trees, same species, next to one another, change color at different times? Is it the depth of their roots? Did the tree that germinated first get primo root location and access to water? Is one tree imperceptibly taller than the other? Anyway, I sat against the trunk of this tree to get the shot, and in processing, it seemed somewhat vertigious:



(its sibling - I prefer this shot, but Nick likes the former:)



I know I'm sort of waxing poetic about something that happens EVERY YEAR and is hardly news to my fellow midwesterners, but this is truly my first autumn in SEVEN years!! Rediscovery? Understatement.

So one of the things that struck me as I walked and craned my neck toward the canopy was the repetition of nature. I mean, yes, fractal theory of course applies to nature and natural elements, so to say that nature repeats its patterns at infinitum is about as revolutionary as saying that water is wet. But witnessing it for yourself is still pretty damn cool. Like this shot, looking upward at the network of tree branches and leaves that are not-so-vaguely reminiscent of the veining on the underside of an individual leaf:



I encountered only a few people on the trails at Cox Arboretum, and in one very remote section I came upon a virtual carpet of leaves that seemed relatively undisturbed by feet. It was late enough in the day at this point that there wasn't much sunlight coming through the treetops, but enough to grab this shot:



And after taking that shot, I may or may not have tromped through that pathway like a little kid flying face-first into a freshly-raked pile. *gulp*

When I finally found my way back to civilization, the sun was at a low enough angle to get some warm shots of the pond area of the park. The pond is full of koi fish, turtles, and lilypads, but the mild autumn coloring of the trees and their reflection in the water was what struck me.



There's also a small bridge over a second pond, and after waiting for a swarm of pedestrians to run back and forth over it, the wind died down to nothing and I managed to get a pretty clear reflection:



After walking around and assessing the photo-worthy opportunities at Cox, I started the drive back to our place. I purposely diverted to Carillon Park, on the perimeter of the University of Dayton, ~5 minutes South of us. Carillon Park has a museum, a cafe, and a belltower, but also has a large open green space on which I could imagine college student congregating for frisbee or studying ... but on this day, I had it all to myself. It was late enough in the day that the sun was low and warm and pleasing, although the autumn colors could hardly be considered "peak".



This picture was an accidental result of seriously overexposing the image - when I tried to recover it in Lightroom, it created this oddly-colored picture. But ... I don't hate it. =)



And my last shot of the day was taken facing West, actually. The lighting isn't ideal, but it's better than I would have expected for a West-facing shot at 6 pm in the winter. I liked the look of the clouds hovering over the river (you can't see it, but it's just behind the trees) with the subtle fall colors on the trees.



I haven't yet uploaded my pictures from Caesar Creek Park, although I expect there aren't too many keepers among them. =( Right now, I'm trying to focus on getting some Alaska pictures developed - it's been long enough, right?! ahem. So hopefully there will be more updates to come SOON!