My mom always says, “Can you imagine how how scary the first fall must have been? To think everything was dying?” As I watched the leaves fall in the yard the last few weeks I thought about that a lot, what it would have been like. It must have been scary to see the leaves change their shades, and then to witness them wither and fall into heaps on the ground. It must have felt like the world was ending. 

But my favorite time of year is fall. People now drive for hundreds of miles to witness the changing leaves in the mountains.  It’s the busiest time of year here and I can see why:

In that photo above can you see the yellow tree on the right hand side of the photo? That’s a gingko tree. It was brought over from China by a missionary in the 1940’s. It’s usually the very last tree in Bryson City to lose its leaves. I wanted to get a picture of it this year but one day I was driving through town and saw a group of people standing underneath it. All of the leaves were falling all at once! It only took about thirty minutes for every single yellow gingko leaf to fall to the ground. Maybe because of the drought we’ve had. It was the most bizarre thing. I meant to come back later and capture all the fallen leaves but by the afternoon they had already been blown away by a leaf blower. I’ll just have to look forward to getting a picture next year. 

Almost all of the leaves have fallen now.  Sun beams wake me up in the morning now because of the naked trees. In the spring and summer the entire yard is shaded until mid morning. I was worried about the chickens with the cold. I check on them every night in the coop but they always seem fine. They sit on their perches and puff out all their feathers so they look like little butterballs. Some nights I make them some hot oatmeal/corn mash right before they go to bed. Brett made them a wind screen with some old windows o the front of the chicken run. They love it….the windows warm up that side of the run almost like a little sunroom: 

I don’t know if you’ve been following the fires but it’s been really bad here. The smoke was so bad I couldn’t even turn on the heat for the longest time:

We can heat the house from our wood stove thank goodness, so we were able to keep the smoke out when it was at its worst:

Last weekend Brett and Boo were splitting firewood to re-stock our supply for the winter:

Finally the rains came and the air has cleared. All the Christmas lights are up around the train depot for the Polar Express:

Hopefully the fires will be put out for good now as the rain continues. I was worried about our little town for a while but we ended up being okay. The fires in Gatlinburg have just been tragic and so much of the Smokies have burned. Keep all those affected in your prayers! #smokiesstrong