Long Shot

I wish you'd come in once in awhile, just to say hello.

 

Scrumptious

Another sunrise with color good enough to eat. I saw a dry cornfield ready for harvest, orange in the early light, with high red clouds drybrushed in swirls across an azure sky. It was but a passing moment, not an extended process building to a crescendo as in Morning Muse, but the beauty was potent and woke me to appreciate the quiet splendor of Southern Indiana at dawn, I had been but doing my job on a highway I'd travelled uncounted times (US 231 north of Spencer), then my eyes were opened.

The next thing I saw was the color in the trees. Autumn is in its early stages yet, but it's been a couple of weeks now since it began. Again, though, I'd only ever looked with my mundane eye. Now I saw red, orange, yellow mixed amongst the predominant green, muted as they were in the nascent light. The colors themselves, but especially their mixtures ignited my soul. It's as if my subtle emotion body were an egg shaped sphere where disparate zones glow with the stimulus of different wavelengths of light; the intermediate areas being the most exciting, if the least energized. I'm not trying to be poetic, I'm trying to describe what autumn actually feels like to me.

It wasn't long until I was back at work; the landscape, the sky, the air appreciated but mere backdrop. Traffic to negotiate, customers to deal with, loads to be secured and unsecured. My last load of the day was my first wide load. I've done over length before, where you have to be really careful rounding corners, but this load stuck out beyond the sides of the trailer. It was a piece of housing for the new crusher over at Independent Quarry. It required a permit, the banners and the flags, but it wasn't big enough to need an escort, I was wishing I had one though. "How the hell am I going to get that thing down Victor Pike?" I wondered. It was late enough that at least I figured I wouldn't meet any trucks coming the other way. A school bus might be a problem but most cars are below the bed of my trailer anyway. What was the first thing that I met once I'd turned onto Victor? You guessed it, two big trucks coming my way. No problem.

Who has time to savour the subtlety of the environment, especially when it's your home and you see it every day? It won't be long now, though, till Autumn is in our faces and can't be ignored. I'm sure that I'll feel then as I usually do, that although it's but a brief episode of the year the fall color is somehow eternal.