Sentiments of Autumn Perhaps

I still find myself feeling surprised that Logan is home--and that I plan on it being so until the day that I die. Logan. Cache Valley. The farm. It feels something like saying the names of my new babies over and over until the names finally began to sound real and a part of our family rather than like playing pretend. Ogden has been so much home and so much a part of my identity (and, for generations, my family's identity). I wonder a little how I can be planted firmly in Cache Valley with such Ogden blood running in my veins. (And it isn't just blood, you know. Or, at least, not just DNA. I think my blood could be just as well described as: Polk's End. And walking up to Taylor elementary and home from church through where our backyard touched Robins Ave. It's full of sledding the "no-dump" hill, driving the backroads to Ogden High, Christmas Eve at my grandma's up 27th street and balancing on the metal railing around her patio and past her back porch rose garden. It's countless runs behind Mt. Ogden golf course, and countless hikes to Malan's Peak and along Indian Trail. It's Weber State's campus and my dad's office window in the social sciences building, Christmas Village on 25th street, the Memmott's big tree house, Rainbow Gardens, and Farr's Ice Cream.)

For all of that, I love it here. There seems to have been room in my heart yet for a grafting in with this valley. Perhaps my ancestors felt the same as they settled in--and maybe even came to love--these areas while simultaneously wondering if their children and grandchildren would somehow still carry whispers of and tuggings towards Norway, and England, and Scottland, and Denmark, and Ireland, and Switzerland. 

That's silly I suppose. To compare a change across oceans with my tiny re-planting an hour's drive north. Even so, I feel a deeper kinship and understanding with them.

And also, it could just be that it's fall. It seems to have made me more contemplative and sentimental this year. My heart feels drawn out in thoughts of seasons (of life as well as nature). I don't know why exactly. Maybe it has something to do with how much better acquainted I've become with the seasons here. Particularly fall. And not just the ash's orange-tipped yellow leaves. Yes those (thank goodness).

But also the sun setting further and further south until it sinks into the highest tips of the Wellsvilles outside my kitchen-sink window. And milkweed opening like southern cotton all along the ditch banks. (Why does that one make me unaccountably happy? I don't know. But it's nice that there are strange little things like that in life that do.)

The season's final hay crops bundled in fields. The Zilles' farmland down the road from the church turning orange with pumpkins. The fall gathering of red-winged blackbirds. Everything on the farm shifting from green to yellow, and the weeds along the roadways changing not only to yellow but to browns and reds as well.

There's something in all the noticing that makes one think and feel more. (Or at least ramble more!)

And with that, I think I will go make a regular old "glimpses of the happenings around here" type of post.