Seen in Tennessee while driving forever the interstate, where bridges take one directly over the River Styx so that one doesn’t have to worry about potentially falling out of the boat which good Charon directs to and fro, back and forth across it’s mirrored surface (this is a very poor analogy because really it’s the interstate that is hell (or Hades) and not any destination that one might find at the end of, so really it’s the threshold crossed when getting into my car that is the figurative Styx, and not any physical feature of the environment itself):

bunches of orange and red, and burnt-orange, a brown, and a whole range of shades in between, some duller, some brighter mounded up as far as the eye can see, like great piles raked together, and the autumn-blue sky (because it is such a distinctive blue) complementing; fields and hills of golden-yellow grass, burnished and bronzey, anywhere there isn’t a forest or highway or gas station or sky. The colors are the colors of a life tempered in fire—they run in the blood. If you make it through winter you’re a survivor, you’ve run the gamut, and you can paint a picture, or many pictures, of all these experiences, and you can write about them and go to sleep with a contented mind knowing what you accomplished, and then maybe you will publish them in a blog, and maybe some people will read about them, or maybe no one will, but it won’t make much of a difference to you one way or the other because you were alive then to experience all that, and you’re a new you, alive now to new experiences, or reliving old experiences and perhaps viewing them in new ways because you’re a new person continually becoming a new person experiencing new things and experiencing old things in new ways (or is that just the supposed old things when recalled to mind are new in that instant?)