By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
The fall colors aren’t here yet, but you can feel the forests getting ready for it. Some of the smaller trees are starting to add a little bit of yellow or red to their still mostly green color palate.
It’s kind of like those opening notes of the orchestra, before the symphony begins. The tuning and the rehearsing. Somewhere in the background a piccolo runs a scale with a trill at the end. Something big is getting ready to happen, but not just yet, and then…
That’s where I feel like we’re at with the autumn colors. I’m not really sure when the colors are going to hit, but I know it isn’t far off now.
I’ve been thinking about that as I drive back and forth across the county.
The autumn is my favorite time of the year, and one of the things I missed most when I lived outside Kentucky was the changing of the leaves.
In Texas the leaves usually stayed green through the winter. If you had leaves change color, it was during the dry, hot part of summer, when they’d wither and turn brown before returning with the rains. While I enjoyed picking fresh tomatoes and peppers from the backyard for salsa to go with Thanksgiving tamales, I missed the fall colors.
Any hopes I had of fall color magic in Colorado vanished as quickly as aspen leaves in the wind – the season short and my time restricted. There was a certain magic in the landscape; the hot air balloons colorful baubles against a background of perpetually snow-capped mountains and a long, flat foreground of farmland and fields.
But in my mind noting compares to the rugged beauty of eastern Kentucky – and she’s at her finest in the fall.
It’s when the leaves begin to change that the diversity of our forests really becomes apparent. Appalachian forests aren’t the solid yellow of an autumn aspen grove, or the evergreen of Texas live oak.
There are a lot of different types of trees here, living close together. Appalachia’s mix of maple, hickory, oak, beech, and poplar join with redbud, dogwood, pawpaw, apple, elder, and a wide diversity of species and varieties to put on a color show that is unrivaled anywhere in the world that I’ve had the pleasure to visit.
At its peak, it’s more than a pretty landscape – it’s an awe inspiring experience. For those who feel closest to their creator when appreciating His creation, like myself, it can be a nearly religious experience.
And all for the price of enough gas to drive a ridge line. I can’t wait.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
