Ode to Fall by Bonnie Le Hamilton

It's October, the leaves are falling and Jack Frost has paid a visit or two -- around here anyway. Monday, a friend sent out a text asking people to come pick their apples, before the frost came to ruin them. Actually, I’ve had a lot of people offer me apples from their trees in the last couple of weeks. I’ve also been offered plums and rhubarb. It's obviously harvest season.

It’s getting colder, and snow is already piling up on the mountain tops, while my family and friends who live further south are thankful the temps have dipped to below 100. I’m thankful I don’t have to live in that kind of heat, but there are drawbacks to living up north too.

Sooner or later the snow is going to start falling and rakes will be replaced by snow shovels. Though I have lived were snow is a rare, and minimal occurrence.

As a teenager I had a hard time not laughing when the guys giving us a ride one morning announced they wouldn’t have been able to get out of their flat driveway without a four-wheel drive because of maybe an inch of snow, if even that! I just couldn’t believe anyone would consider themselves snowed in over that little bit of the white stuff.

Though I think I had an even harder time not cracking up when I lived in Norfolk Virginia. One time, I was at the base exchange in the food court, as I took my seat, I spotted teeny tiny flakes drifting past the landscape lights out front then melting into the ground. It didn’t bother me a bit, it was melting -- everything’s fine, but a few seconds later a man jumped up, sending his chair flying as he loudly announced that it was snowing. Within seconds, I was the only customer left. Everyone who could scrambled for their cars, hoping they could get home before the roads got bad.

One of the employees approached me and asked me why I wasn’t trying to get home before the roads got bad. I glanced at the congestion currently in the parking lot, glanced at my watch, and said, “The roads will be clear in about twenty minutes.”

And I was right! Not another soul was on the road when I left the Exchange twenty minutes later.

Another time, my husband and I got tickets to the circus for opening night, and the weathermen in the area were saying we going to get six or more inches that night. History already showed, if they said snow on opening night, prepare for lots of it (at least by Virginia standards).

So, we made sure we got there early enough to park in the underground garage next to the Scope, but as we got out of our car we noticed everyone around us had their vehicles piled high with sleeping bags, pillows, and blankets and as we waited in line, everyone was discussing their "just in case" preparations. Someone glanced our way and asked my husband what he’d packed along. He replied, “My Idaho driver’s license.”

And it did snow that night, something like three whole inches. When it came time to leave, everyone else was having trouble getting up out of the garage, because of the snow, and there were attendants there helping to push everyone up onto the road.

When our turn came, Tom drove up and out before those attendants could get behind our car. I could have even made it up that slight incline, despite the snow.

Actually, we’ve both seen worse, as in a night involving a very steep hill and an ice storm while we were all inside a building on the side of a hill, and the parking lot was further up the hill. To get out of there, you could either go down a very steep hill past the building, or drive up over a bump and take a more gradual incline, but longer route, down the hill.

The problem was getting up over that bump, let alone slipping and sliding all the way up that hill to the parking lot. A couple of guys offered my friend I’d ridden with to get her car and bring it to us at the door of the building, but from there, we had to white knuckle our way down the hill. Believe me, I’m very glad I wasn’t driving! Talk about scary!

My eventual husband was in the group getting all those carloads over that bump, which, from what I could see, was a lot of work.

But mostly all this cold weather reminds me it's time for me to get ready for Nano, so happy writing everyone!