We’re back on our son’s front porch in North Carolina. The temperatures are mild, and it’s wonderful drinking our morning coffee out here. Yesterday, a long, gentle rain fell, but we could still sit on the porch and watch the rain fall, and it was lovely.
The woods next door offers a beautiful view of fall colors. We get to experience an extended fall season.
This morning’s show included an occasional leaf gently floating down and many active birds…the ones I could identify were finches, eastern blue birds and a woodpecker. The cardinal is the state bird of North Carolina, and I’ve seen many already, just not this morning.
Our trip to the north shore proved to be a lot more colorful than we were expecting.
We had already started seeing pockets of beautiful fall colors on our drive up, so I started to get a little excited…and then the colors began to pop out everywhere…with wonderful contrasts to the evergreen trees.
The weather also turned out better than I had hoped for, with warmer temperatures and some nice sunshine and blue skies (and one cloudy day). We had packed clothes for colder weather.
We followed our annual routine of balancing cabin time and lake time with hiking and local drives.
We watched the sun rise over the big lake and had a camp fire on the rocks. We stopped in Hinckley and Duluth on the way up, and stopped in Grand Marais one day. It’s all so familiar, yet all so refreshing, relaxing, and restorative… and so much fun!
The colors were breathtaking…everywhere we went. It was spectacular to see and hard to photograph with my iPhone.
But it was enough to witness the colors and breath in the fresh air, smell the different whiffs of pine scents, lake water, decomposing leaves, feel the crisp air and to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8a).
I stand in awe of the Creator of these incredible autumn colors.
And the colors were not only up north…we saw them driving home, and right here in Northfield, and outside our front and back doors!