Lightning

I just love the aspen trees in this picture, tumbling heedlessly over that cliff like gold lightning racing toward the ground.

This Fall has been the way Fall always is, warm October days packed so tightly between the brittle nights that they start to bulge and burst around the edges; everything dazzling and sudden and fleeting as we try to fit in one more thing before the weather turns. I'm taking pictures faster than I can edit them; convinced every time I go anywhere that this particular tree is the brightest red, this patch of mountain the sharpest yellow; trying to grab and pocket each individual flash of light from the sun as it sets sooner and sooner over the western hills.

I've written about it before, but when does that ever stop me from writing about it again? If finding time to reflect on things was hard ten years ago, it's only gotten harder with each passing season, as my heart has had to unfold itself around ever widening and branching paths with each child I've had. They're so surprising! And changeable! It's like that most-delightfully-named developmental stage, the Mulberry Stage, where a zygote divides until it fills itself nearly to bursting, and then suddenly blossoms into something completely new and differentiated and almost person-like---only I'm having to keep up with all six of them doing it over and over, while I watch helplessly and wish I had more minutes to sit still and ponder what it all means.

My eldest son, this brilliant boy, had another birthday and I wanted to grab him by both shoulders and make him freeze just like this, happy and talkative and insightful; maybe bottle his 11-year-old self and store it up so I can have it again, just a taste, after he's moved beyond bears and magic and Rubik's Cubes. I settled for telling him, sternly, that he better not have any big ideas about growing taller than me, to which he replied, (quite cheekily, I thought) that growing taller than me was the highest, holiest aim of his existence.

What did I ever do to deserve such a boy?

Well, anyway. My brother and his family were here and we got up into the mountains for an afternoon at Sundance, and it was gold and quiet and perfect before everything raced on again.

When I said it was "quiet" I was speaking relatively. Or perhaps even metaphorically.

Benjamin runs. (I sing that too the tune of a camp song: "Happiness runs, happiness runs runs runs, Benjamin runs, Benjamin runs runs!" It's true. He does.)

Seems like this girl was just barely a waving baby, yelling "Hiiii!" to our fellow ski-lift riders.

Now she's an intrepid hikeress. (Did I just coin that word? I like how it sounds like "tigress.")

My favorite color (yellow), and my favorite color OF it!! Would you call this "marigold"?

Love this gradient from red to rust. The brown leaves didn't look dead, they just looked russet.

Totally uninterested in taking pictures---but the sweater my friend made for her is SO darling, I kept trying anyway.

Yellow soldiers cresting the hill

A Juniper wearing a daisy-flower hat

Birthday boy

Seb and Ben, birds of a feather

I love the breaking tidal wave of yellow on the right side of this picture ^^^