On the way to work today, the leaves were falling like snowflakes across my path, portending the not-so-long-from-now real snowflakes that fall so prodigiously up here in MA.

North Carolina...oh, the lovely mountains...NC rather stopped getting the kind of snow and ice storms that it did when I first moved to the mountains back in '03.

I don't mind the snow. Not this early in the game. NC used to be seasonally appropriate. Then it got warmer, in general. I had to move to MA to once again get seasonally appropriate weather.

I have been here for a whole turn of the wheel, and then some. The trees are just about in full colored glory. Somehow, this year, they seem dead on the branches, which, I suppose they are, but they seem...dry. Wispy. Fly-away.

I've always known that the glorious leaf-coloring is the trees dying...I wonder if human death is so glorious, for the one that is dying. I wish it were so, for those of us left, when a loved one passes beyond the veil. How cool would it be if we went out in a blaze of multi-colored glory?

It's Samhain-tide. It's Ancestor time. I have made my altar and this year it only has my father and my grandmother (his mother, at about age 18) on there. I haven't even put my grandmother's hair thingy there yet. I will still wear it to the Samhain rite, as I do every year. It's funny how my dad was an airline pilot, and instinctively, I put next to him on the altar symbols of flight, of Air-- most of a whole bird's wing that I found in the back yard, a larger feather, a picture of a crow. I don't think it was accidental at all.

I feel them. Do you? Do you feel the pull of your ancestors? What are you doing this year to honor them?