Fall

Fall in Colorado happens overnight.

One afternoon you'll be bathed in gloriously warm sunshine and wish you could take the afternoon off to go to the pool and the next morning you'll wake up to a frost covered windshield and bright yellow leaves crunching underfoot.

For about one week all the leaves will be the most intense eye-burning colors. Leaving the confines of the indoors and stepping out into the glaring sun is so breathtakingly beautiful that you involuntarily stop short, in awe of what you see.

The heavy, earthen scent of fall is so pervasive that for a moment you are transported back to the afternoon you spent raking leaves and jumping into the pile. You expect to open your door to the inviting smell of cinnamon and pumpkin pie. You wonder why there isn't more brown and orange in your closet.

All you want to do is take the day off to enjoy the unearthly majesty that is open to anyone for the taking who will step up and take it. No, not the unearthly majesty. The complete, quintessential earthly, terrestrial experience.

You want to grab it, hold on, soak every moment up into your being so that you can always experience a day like this. An hour like this. A moment.

You realize that in a month (that will trip by without being noticed) you will be locked into the cold, gray death-grip of winter. Then you will look back at Colorado fall and realize, with deep regret, that you spent those few weeks indoors. Took for granted the sun and the dry hem of your currently ice covered jeans. Never went in a corn maze or picked a pumpkin from a real patch. Never made that pumpkin pie.

And instead of those thoughts making you sad, you'll realize that fall will come again. Colorado will never let you down. And next time, you won't waste a minute.