A Time to Fall

      This is my first response to the call for October Art. I'm going to tell a little story in pictures about my trip to Poughkeepsie, New York.

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      Tucked in the Hudson River Valley, Poughkeepsie sleeps alongside the estates of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Ruth Livingston Mills. Up the road a few miles, at the foot of the Catskills, you'll find the homes of the most famous artists from the Hudson River School movement, artists like Frederic Church and Thomas Cole. Artists and men who wiled away their hours just thinking and painting and chasing the colors of light in the sky.

      Today, just as then, Poughkeepsie is a quiet town, a hard-working town, a picture of middle America --halfway between the dreams of the past and the hopes of the future.

      In the Hudson River Valley, it's easy to see a world created by God. It's a place where the seasons happen in natural order, with passion, and I daresay in excess. For a study in autumn, there are few better subjects, and on Columbus Day weekend in 2008, my friends and I found ourselves at the peak of the season. We found ourselves in the midst of living proof that whether or not God is all-loving, or all-powerful, or all-knowing, He is without doubt a true artist.

      In every color: an emotion. In every fallen leaf: a teardrop. From the tops of mountains, the sides of ridges, you can discover the inspiration for every colonial patchwork quilt. It's the rise and fall of the land and an expertly stitched landscape sewn through the eye of Heaven's needle. It's a quilt you'd like to wrap around yourself. It's the blanket Rip Van Winkle used for his many-yeared slumber. This is the season where those tales were born, a season that erases the line between water and sky. One world reflects the other: taunting, haunting.

      I took this picture on the roadside in a spot where I was sure that right-side-up and upside-down could double-dutch and laugh.