A Leaf Downpour

The Exorcist, Naked Women and Naked Trees

I am old enough to have seen, The Exorcist, the week it first came out in theaters back in 1973. If my math is correct that was approximately 43 years ago. I was still fairly young and stupid back then. Nowadays you couldn’t pay me to watch a horror movie.

Well, I happened to think about that movie this afternoon while taking a delightful walk. My afternoon walks have been nothing short of euphoric the last week due, in large part, to the fact that the trees here in my town on the Great Plains of Turtle Island have been in peak fall foliage. The colors and the beauty take my breath away. It only happens once a year and I never miss it.

The fall foliage peaked about ten days to two weeks later than it did last year but I am not overly alarmed by this. Mother Nature doesn’t follow to the letter that free calendar I got from my bank which hangs on the wall in my kitchen.

What made this afternoon’s walk different than those of the last week is that today we had a stiff breeze blowing. I am not exactly comfortable with the adjective, “stiff,” in relation to wind. If wind is stiff then it is unbending and not moving which wind never really is. “Stiff,” probably applies more succinctly to that which the wind wallops in its relentless trajectory. (“The walking refugees stiffened…