It's that part where you literally have to pull your car over to take a few photos because it's that amazing (and even then the photos are never as breathtaking as what you just experienced.)
It's that part where we stop to collect leaves, knowing full well we can't keep them. Their color, their waxy perfection is so transient. Like the first lines of a Robert Frost poem, I know in my heart I can't keep it, but they somehow come home with us anyhow, scooped up in little hands with hopeful hearts.
It's that part where you think the dazzling day is done. You think it's last call and you button up your sweater and start to head inside and then THIS happens.
I start taking photos so rapidly, so intently knowing it is changing by the minute, fading and sinking. I am so inside the image I fail to see there are three other people who have perched themselves around the marina, cameras in hand for the same reason. We're all toasting this party we call autumn on the east coast.
And now I sit in the cool, dark, long night looking at my photographs from the wild week of color and light, and I close my eyes and secretly hope that the hangover come December (and January, and February) won't hurt as badly as years past.
