Trees

I guess you have to have some tradeoffs to not wear a jacket through the month of October. The NC tradeoff is that the leaves on the trees just turn brown and fall off. There are a few that turn a little yellowy, but that's about it. I drive on a little country road on the way to work (that's another story in itself), and I thought it would be great during the fall. So many trees to look at - well, it's starting to get a little depressing. At least when the leaves in VT fall off, they look pretty before the do it. I suppose that's the tradeoff for living in VT - once the leaves fall off you'd better have a parka ready because it's going to be COOOLLLDD! (And that's how you'd say it when your teeth were chattering because you weren't wearing a parka)

So this country road that I drive on.... In case you didn't know, we live in Raleigh, NC, which is a pretty big city. The whole "Triangle" region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and the Contained Area for Relocated Yankees known as Cary) has a lot of people. I listen to traffic reports on the way to work and think, where are all these people, because they certainly don't drive on the roads I take. The highways are so congested that they often close multiple lanes of traffic, or at least make you sit there for a few hours. However, as I drive from southwest Raleigh to Northwest Raleigh, I hardly see any of it. One of my coworkers has lived in north Raleigh for about 15 years. She said that when she first moved there, goats and cows would sometimes escape from nearby farms and wander through her yard. Now, I'm not talking 1950 here, that would be about 1980, and this suburb is not far from the center of the city. Yet once you get outside city limits, the people disappear. I guess NC is more like VT than a certain someone likes to admit. Towns, and then no people is similar to cities and then no people. Except of course for the Cary Crossroads shopping center. You could live in there, and it doesn't even have a WalMart.