It's just THERE...

Sitting in a rest area near the Tennessee-Kentucky border. Just finished eating supper (Campbell's Condensed Bean with Bacon goes down fairly well cold, straight out of the can). When I finish this brief note I'll go to bed, I think.

It's odd, what you can get used to--the nuisances and the niceties both. Cold odds and ends for supper never bothered me, but I didn't expect to be quite so casual about it. And I never really thought I'd get jaded by autumn.

I expected the trees to be bare by now, for some reason. But the color isn't gone yet. I was surrounded by it today. Even under a gray sky it was lovely--pastels rather than flourescents. I was paying more attention to the road, though. The hills around me got passing glances.

I've been driving through valleys and along mountainsides for a couple of weeks now, surrounded by Color. The kind of (capital-C) Color that turns autumn into the major tourist season in the Appalachians. Bright yellows and reds in a hundred shades--sometimes almost glowing in bright sunlight, sometimes quiet and subdued in gray mists and fogs. Mountains rising out of clouds that I too was floating above--gray-mist pastel on the lower slopes, brilliant red-and-gold near the peak where the sun reached them. I would admire for a few seconds--then a curve would come up and I had to go back to work.

Eventually it occurred to me that while I was getting bored with all that beauty, my wife hadn't seen it at all. So last time I was home, I took her up into the north Georgia hills and we just wandered around. Like all the other tourists. She said it was the nicest present she'd had in a good while. I enjoyed it too.

Odd, how different something looks when you don't *have* to look at it.