What Difference Does a Season Make?

I’m catching up with myself, from this time a few years back when I imagined keeping up all along through an entire year with a seasonal journal–part of my “Floyd County Almanac” that sits just exactly where it did when I abandoned it.

I remember as I wrote this thinking how smug of me to look out my window at leaves almost all fallen from the trees and all insect night noises silenced while I simply went upstairs and brought down the long sleeves when winter approached.

Not a one of the millions of other living things we share the northern hemisphere with have it so easy!

From autumn of 2012, here’s a first paragraph of a longer piece uploaded to Medium, should you care to read or bookmark.

Autumn a Change in Cadence and Key

[su_quote]Though a few poetic souls and tree-hugging types like me will make soft cooing noises about the magic of the coming of fall, many pay no mind to these aesthetics at all. And for most of my fellow humans, from a practical, survival point of view, autumn connotes no more inconvenience than the putting-on of a warmer pair of slippers of a morning. [/su_quote]

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. I love this essay, fellow naturalist. Autumn is coming very late to southern Utah, so our plans to photograph yellow cottonwood leaves against red rock will not come to pass. We hit it spot on last year. Most of the campgrounds have closed, out of habit.