The colors of fall...

Blue: The harbor on a Saturday morning bike ride.

Silver: Rain-slick roadway.

Yellow: Grass, with some late-summer puffballs wilting in the rain.

I thought that I would be missing fall, around here.  I haven't had a proper New England fall, with apple cider and red maple leaves and Halloween in... years!  My last few falls have been spent either in rainy Portland, OR or frozen Ross Island, Antarctica.  At some point in the season, I usually decide I feel a little nostalgic for the benchmark moments of autumn as I remember them from my youth.  But this year, surprisingly, Svalbard is delivering them to me in subtle new ways!  There are crops of mushrooms growing all along the hillsides around town.  So far, I haven't remembered to take the camera along and photograph them, but there is a huge variety of mushrooms for a small area-- and the browns and whites and blush-reds of them are as good as an autumn leaf-pile any day.  The entire landscape is also changing quietly-- the grasses are changing color from green to rusty orange and yellow, and as I look across the valley I see the same sea of autumn colors that I would once have spied from the Hundred-Mile View on Hogback Mountain, VT.  The difference is that the color spreads more like a moss across the entire landscape, instead of puffing and bursting from individual tree-tops.  And I can also view this color-scape right from sea-level, instead of having to climb to the mountain-top to get the whole spread within my sight-lines.  Tyler and I started our Sunday morning today with a lovely walk past the dog yards, where there is usually some great bird-watching.  The last hold-outs of the season are still around: barnacle geese, purple sandpipers, terns and glaucous gulls... no doubt, most of them will soon be headed south.  The sun is low on the horizon, and the shadows fall longer every day... I can't wait to see the colors of winter!  White snowscapes under blue moonlight, and ghostly green auroras... cozy firelight... it's all coming soon!