Early fall color

With the afternoon actually trending towards the warm side, I headed up to the lake for a swim. It's been a funny summer: quite perfect, for my tastes, which is to say, almost never torrid. But it's also rarely been warm enough to take the chill off the lake water. Usually, by this point, the lake's a bathtub, and you can just waltz in. Not this year. It still takes some convincing to get fully wet. But I did, had a great swim, and when I'd had enough, I headed for a towel and some dry clothes. On my walk up to the bath-house, I spotted a young maple. It was sporting what, even if no one wants to acknowledge this, looked suspiciously like fall colors. They weren't, of course; the foliage hues were the result of the tree's response to drought, and you can see this in other low-water areas, particularly on the road cuts by the highways where the trees are in October mode. Still, it resembles autumn. I shivered a little seeing this. I savored what little summer we have left.