the Autumn palette ripens

This blog isn't the only place where a month can pass by without my attention. I was printing in my studio today and turned around at one point and noticed my Nikki McClure calendar was turned to August. I hate missing a whole month of calendar art! Alas, I flipped two pages to October and went back to printing.
Had i really not been out there since August?
It's true.

For the first time I actually have a half-way reasonable excuse for not writing here recently: my computer crashed and died. Apparently the little arm that carries the laser that reads the scratches on the discs that make (made) up my harddrive moved just a tiny little bit - less than the width of a hair, just a little tiny jiggle - and it completely destroyed everything. I know that I am technologically dependent, especially now that I live so far away from so many of the people in my life, but the extent to which a tiny little hiccup inside this white plastic box affected my life, my work, even my thought processes, was really incredible. It is 'fixed' now - new harddrive, fresh start, clean slate. Farewell to my messy OLD slate. A lot of ideas and post-it notes went down with the ship, likely never to be seen again.

I lit the gas heaters in the house and my studio yesterday. The days have been the perfect temperature, between 60 and 70 degrees, but the nights have been in the 40s, dipping into the high 30s in the early mornings. It seems like the house is just getting warmed up by the time the sun drops below the trees along the creek to the west of the house each evening. Time to light the stoves.

And time for orange. Gone are the pinks and blues of summer, with green following close behind. Now is the time for the ripening of the orange Autumn palette. I picked the last of my sugar pumpkins this afternoon. They'd been trampled a few times by pesky cows that kept getting into the yard last month and as a result the crop had been thinned out fairly substantially. So we'll only have a dozen pumpkin pies, instead of thirty. I suppose we'll manage. I've also been picking the other winter squash as they ripen and harden off. When the acorn squash are ripe, the bottomside turns orange. The dusk skies, too, are orange. And the clouds near the horizon at sunset. And, of course, the leaves provide flashes of orange, amid the warm spectrum of reds to yellows. Well, and it's football season. Since the Cody Cowboys' colors are orange and black, you know it's a game day when you see a rather ridiculous number of folks sporting orange turtlenecks, scarves, socks, jackets. Three of the baby kittens are Max-colored (yellow?), two are calico, and one...is bright orange. My nasturtiums finally decided to blossom, adding a few flowers to my orange parade. It even smells orange here now.

It is a delicious time. Cozy and even a bit decadent. An "eating pie in front of the fire sitting on pillows with a cat in your lap" kind of feeling. Not that I have a fire or a cat that I let come inside, but that's the gist of the feeling right now. The fall into Winter. It does feel a bit like a fall - a letting go. Letting go of fresh tomatoes, open windows, the color green, bare feet. See you again next year, toes.