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Autumn

Doug Kreuz photo, AZ Daily Star 9/10/2012
Autumn!, it says.  There it is:  autumn, in all its grandeur!

 Well, it did not actually say that, in so many words, but it would be foolhardy to ignore a yellow leaf when you see one, or three. First a yellow leaf, and then . . . a couple more, I suppose.

The temperature will be almost a hundred, again, today, as it is almost every day, which is evidence that falling temperatures have something to do with . . .

No, I don't get it, either!

Oh, heck!  I do get it.  What I get is that autumn in the desert is not the same as autumn in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  Autumn in Grand Marais is like a landslide of leaves, as if something descended from somewhere even farther north--that would be Canada and the Bering Sea, maybe--sweeping down to set a cold fire to tree tops, tumbling broken rainbows of color to the ground, and continuing on south to Duluth, and Minneapolis, and probably to Arkansas.

There are such glorious places in Arizona, too, but not so much in the desert as in the canyons where the water wanders in sometimes subterranean paths past waiting trees.  When the light comes lower in the sky, and the cliffs seem higher in the sky, sometimes the trees burn yellow, where the chlorophyll had hidden it.

Autumn!  

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