Fayetteville on Friday put on its holiday season getup, switching on hundreds of thousands of lights around the downtown square. The event’s been plenty cold in past years, but this evening it was warm enough for T-shirts and shorts. Arkansas is part of the South, obviously, but it’s not so Southern that seeing a parade with Santa Claus with temperatures in the 60s is normal.
The temperature mismatch has corrected itself since Friday evening, but in my mind it does help show how we’re in a liminal, transitional time at the moment. It’s not quite winter, but more and more of the trees are bare. Some people have Christmas trees up while others won’t tolerate holiday music until after Thanksgiving, thank you very much. I’m still having a hard time believing it’s already the week of Thanksgiving at all.
We’ll snap out of it soon enough. In the meantime, I’ll take some advice from this lady: If you’re selling kettle corn, make sure you save some for yourself.
Thanks for looking.
One of the few benefits of dreary, drizzly days: the gentle accumulation of countless water droplets, especially on trees with lots of surface area to show off their refraction and remarkable surface tension.
After two days of this, the sun should be back tomorrow.
The zenith of fall’s colors lasts only a few days, and for some reason or another, I think I’ve missed it every year I’ve been here in Arkansas. But this year’s peak fell on a weekend with beautiful weather and plenty of time for a hike — this weekend. I took advantage at the old standby, the Ozark National Forest around Devil’s Den State Park.
What continually amazes me about the annual color explosion is that plants have a lot of the pigments that make it happen year-round, part of a chromatic net to catch as much sunlight as possible. They’re just overwhelmed by the familiar green of chlorophyll. Plants usually have to keep remaking the stuff and stop doing so around this time of year. So the oranges and yellows of carotenoids burst forth, sometimes in a way that looks almost pointillist, as with the oak leaf above. The same class of compounds gives carrots their color. The red is my favorite, though, and comes from a combo of sunlight and sugar.
If you want to see it all, hurry. And thanks for looking.
More and more I wonder whether humans will survive themselves. Neo-Nazis, 
Thanks for looking. Keep working.
Viewfinder 