Fall is My Favorite Time of Year Until Spring Arrives

Then Everything is New Again

Crocus | Notice ‘What’s At Your Feet,’ Photo | By Shannon Mullen O’Keefe

I once made the drive from Omaha, Nebraska to Lawrence, Kansas in October to be with a friend.

That day I followed GPS navigation and ended up on a route that was made up of country roads. This put me squarely in the middle of farm fields all the way. The beauty of the aubergine color in the sky that day which met with the ochre-colored dead grass in the fields stunned me.

I stopped to take a picture of an old barn to commemorate that moment. It was just me, the road, that moment, the barn and the sky.

You can imagine the photo…. the paint on the old brownish weathered boards that made up the barn had long been chipped away by wind and probably hail and other things.

That barn stood alone on the horizon in-between the aubergine and ochre.

On that same drive I saw several flocks of geese making their way south.

And the rest was emptiness — nothing.

Even though I have travelled around the world, the land and the sky I saw on that drive was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I had the feeling that I was driving through a painting and the artist had just perfectly mixed the colors I was driving through. It was honestly as if I’d been…