Mid-September thoughts

I know it's early, but with the cooler nights I am already thinking about flame colored trees and remembering last year's incredible visit to New Hampshire in October. I was there for work, to cover that state's primary and a speech by John McCain, but I sneaked in some leaf-peeping in the White Mountains and southern N.H.... there is truly something about New England's foliage that just knocks me senseless. I think it's simply that there are so many, many maples...?

These pictures, however, were taken in West Virginia in 2007, on my way home to Pittsburgh from Charlottesville, Va.... absurdly brilliant...

This photo, taken of a side road somewhere in the mountains right at the border of Virginia and West Virginia stirs me, too. I wonder where it leads....

My trip took nearly all day. It was starting to get dark, and I was reminded of one of the spookiest/Halloweeniest lines in all of Shakespeare, from Macbeth, I think, which I memorized in high school: "Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood... good things of day begin to droop and drowse, and night's black agents to their prey do rouse..."