Autumn in Virginia

It’s been more than a decade since I moved back to the east from Los Angeles and I never get tired of the transition of summer to fall and winter to spring. The former has really just begun here. The weather is starting to cool off, and the leaves on the trees are just beginning to turn color and fall. We took the kids out to Ticonderoga Farms yesterday where we met some friends. It was a borderline fall day. It started out cool but warmed up quickly. The kids slid down the big slides they have at the farm, and ran through a bamboo maze and went on a hayride and we added three more pumpkins to our collection (now up to ten!). As I said, it is just beginning to look like fall here with the foliage just beginning to turn:

In the fall the skies sometimes start to cloud up in the afternoons and make for quite a spectacular sight:

Fall is also the time of colds and flus. We’ve all gotten our flu shots, and there have been little colds here and there. We had barely left the farm property yesterday when the Little Man turned himself into a geyser  He got  sick. He’d been complaining about his tummy, but we took it as commentary on what he did or didn’t want to eat. We had to pull over and spend about 10 minutes getting everything cleaned up. Despite everything, the mess was relatively contained and, of course, the Little Man felt much better after it was all done.

It did mean that the afternoon and evening were somewhat muted. The Little Man napped and I sat in his room with him while he napped just in case he felt sick again (he didn’t). I made use of the time, catching up on various science reading, and more or less finishing the current issue of Rolling Stone. I’d planned to get in some more writing yesterday–I added about 1,100 words to my work-in-progress in the morning–but there just wasn’t time.

Still, it was a fun day. The fall is on its way. The weather is changing; the air is crisper and soon the trees will be in full riot.

Compared to L.A., this is heaven.