You can’t skip ahead.  This morning, I awakened in the North Woods to a beautiful blue sky day in the midst of intense Fall colors, many leaves having already fallen.

I went walking in the woods for a while.  The smell of the local Aspens and fallen moist leaves was rich and soothing.  Color was everwhere.  Having just attended a water color workshop with Swedish artist Bjorn Bernstrom, the colors and scenes and perspectives were very alive.  The view down the “high line” on our land, across to the distant marsh (a convenient cleared path for connecting trails), was picturesque today.

I wished I could photograph each of the Red Maples, especially, wanting time to stand still.  Their time of redness is so fleeting.  Reaching for my phone to take a shot of a large Maple with deep oranges changing to the most maginficent reds ever as they rested against the most deep blue sky ever observed at the top, my phone shut off, displaying a picture of plugging a cord into it just before.  I was too far from the house to go back to charge up, because I was scheduled to drive South, back to the farm.  I cannot convey the way this tree appeared today in words.  I recognized it from years past, as an especially showy one.  This is a shot of its younger, smaller, self from 2010:

By late afternoon, I was hours South in Illinois, far from the deep woods and water color class.  The landscape (if not the brilliant red sunset) is still green here.  It feels more like Summer than Fall.  Driving North and South between climate zones often feels like time travel.  In the Spring, when you go North, you travel back in time, because it remains winter there well into the point of Spring in Illinois.  This morning I was in an atmosphere about a month or even more ahead of the Illinois seasons, and have traveled back in time back home.   In the North, the Red Maples will suddently drop their leaves upon the next frost, leaving the deep oranges to give way to the yellows and golds already.   This afternoon, I was gazing at green trees and a summer-like October evening.  Matching this question of how things progress, I saw that the new greenhouse project is not as far along as I had hoped it would be upon my return:

This photo is almost an optical illusion, one side appearing shorter, but it is actually further away.   It is a matter of perspective, something I learned a lot about in class this weekend, as can be seen in paintings I completed, like this one, that might have one “bloom” in a spot I don’t prefer:

So, realizing that the pallets of bagged soil mixes for the greenhouses will arrive tomorrow to sit and wait a little longer, I decided to maybe paint or read a good book.  You are where you are.