Snow Globes and Sappy Paintings

I just got done mowing along our drive and along the road. (It took me nearly 2 hours, and that's only a fraction of necessary mowing!) I am putting off cooking dinner so that I can enjoy this beautiful fall day. I'm sitting in the screened porch watching a turkey vulture circle slowly over the upper hay field while my children are playing nearby.

The steady breeze is causing the trees to sway. It murmurs and whispers continuously through leaves and needles. When it freshens to a particularly strong gust, leaves are released in tumbling torrents. They catch the sun and flicker like oversized sparkling glitter. It is so lovely that for a moment I imagine that I am in a giant "snow globe." It is so picturesque that I think briefly of a sickeningly sweet, bucolic, mass marketed Thomas Kinkade painting. This is more perfect, more idyllic, more real. 

But this is no silent still life frozen in time behind walls of containing crystal. A pileated woodpecker is calling intermittently. The distant rooster is screeching his muted warnings to the world. The crows that continually haunt the homestead are crying raucously. Blue Jays are screaming in the distance. A plane is humming overhead. And my children's varied voices are blending into this calming cacophony.  

And this is no quaint and mawkish country scene captured in blurred and muted colors. There is brilliance, clarity, and movement everywhere. The still-green grasses are undulating and waving. The sooty ravens are slowly combing through them in ragged rows. The thin gauze-like clouds shift, stretch, and slide across the large patch of pale blue sky that is framed above the hay by the fringe of treeline. The shadows are slowly growing. My children dart here and there, spreading their excited shrieks, their suppressed giggles, and trails of kicked up and thrown leaves. Into their caps they have stuffed branches, bright with fall foliage. The leafy boughs look like fantastic antlers in the fast-fading light.

Now the leaves of maples along the fencerow are intensely illuminated like new stained glass by the last reach of the lowering sun. And I sigh as I hear my husband's truck roar up the gravel lane. Soon it comes into sight, trailing eddies of fallen leaves and billows of gravel dust. 

Perhaps I am imagining snow globes and paintings because these moments are so few, these moments when I can sit and be and think and absorb, when my children are busy and satisfied, when the world is beautiful and observable. I could use a pause button of sorts. I could bottle this up to release on those difficult, dark days. But then maybe I'd just have an insipid instant to see instead of this serene scene which I savor.