andamu

It has indeed been the "season of mists"; I don't know about the "mellow fruitfulness" part, although I believe a little east of us the apple harvest proceeded well.
This being the Pacific Northwest, autumn has also been the season of the returning rain but, barring a few spells of a couple of days each, we have not experienced much by way of particular cold.

There is a persistent fallacy that the Inuit (or Eskimo) have more than 20 words for snow -- in fact, they have just two. But driving to work in the early autumn mornings here certainly teaches one that there are a multitude of varieties of fog.

There is the low fog, the high fog, the thin fog, the dense fog, the all-encompassing fog, the patchy fog, the spooky tendril fog clinging, the wispy fog, the layered veil fog, the fog hugging the tree tops while leaving their trunks incongruously bare, the fog tucked cozily around the trunks letting the tops float eerily free, the dark fog with cloud cover behind it, and the bright fog with clear sky hidden behind its diaphonous curtain. And that's just the array over the first two weeks of the season!

On a mild morning with the mysterious, patchy fog playing hide and seek with the objects beside the road and providing interesting contrast to the bright autumn foliage taking flame all around, I stopped at a traffic light and swiveled my head to take in the beauty of the early hours.

Then an incongruous sight caught my eye: in the rear-view mirror I saw that behind me an open-topped jeep had pulled up. The driver had fuzzy silver hair ringing his bald pate and a moustache crawling along his upper lip; he was quite improbably perched on zebra-striped seat covers while, of all things, blowing into a harmonica which he directed back and forth with one hand while beating time with the other on the steering wheel, all the time rubbernecking to take in the beautiful morning, just as I had.

You've got to love living in the Pacific Northwest!