Nature in Fall

When the weather shifts and the leaves finally start to color and fall, I always feel a little lift in my spirits.  On mornings when I step out on my front porch into the dark morning, a little bubble of happiness rises in me if there is fog.

Fall can be a show-stopper here in the woodsy south.  I try to get out and walk while the leaves are still mostly holding on, before they all fall off, turn brown and crisp leaving the woods thinned out and gray.

This year, my weekends have been the catch-up of overstuffed week-days, so I didn't get a chance to go far.  I only had an afternoon.  Mount Arabia isn't too far from the city.  The "mount" part is a huge outcropping of granite that was once used as a quarry.  It's a great place to watch meteor showers from a sleeping bag! But a terrible place to hike around under the relentless sun in summer.

It's a place where you can watch primary succession in action--the stone being worn away little by little by rain and wind so that after some thousand years there's enough wear for a little plantlet to take root in the teeniest layer of what will one day be full-out soil.  You can see these little plantlets and wonder at their life and feel your mind boggle at the idea that someday this big mass of rock could be a forest. !!  Never mind the question of how old this rock is in the first place. !!

The little mossy lichens that help hold onto the soil so more plants can grow.

This park (for it is a state park) also has woodsy hiking trails--which is what I wanted, of course--the place with leaves.  And I was not disappointed.

A lot of lucky four leaf clovers here.

We saw some white tail deer too, with white tails so long and fluffy at first I thought they had to be some sort of dogs.

Anyway, now it is Thanksgiving break, and I am hoping for cool weather--cold even.  I am happy and ready to be cozy.