Approaching Winter (season)

What happens to a park when all of the visitors leave, the employees start thinning out, and the facilities start to close?

It does not just go to sleep, I can guarantee that! Time keeps passing by, perhaps a little slower. The leaves continue to lose their soft, green clinging life, and begin the brown brittle journey until they lose the last bit of "strength" that sends them to the ground to be tumbled by the wind and whirled by passing cars. Grass and plants go from green to yellow to brown to gone. The animals which hid from the hordes all summer venture out cautiously, curiously until their presence becomes a constant. Life is settling in, settling down, preparing for the coming months ahead where white blankets the world and ice clings not only to the places where the leaves did, but all structures.

Human life takes on a different quality, a different atmosphere. Friends, roommates, coworkers leave for the winter months, in search of another job, another year of education, another life. Those left behind unite in a force that forges through the winter, the dark hours, the cold, the blizzards.

And then, just as every year, it starts to turn around. The days get a little longer, just a minute or two at a time. The nights are not quite as cold. The snow melts a little faster. The seasonal employees begin their migrations back to the park, in preparation for the migration of visitors. Yellow grasses turn slowly to green, shoots of new plants come poking up through the brown and red and black soil. Buds grow and grow until they turn into the green leaves or the white and yellow and pink and red blooms. Once fat bellied does, then graze cautiously watching the bouncing bundles of brown and energy and white and life spring through the canyons and across the mesas.

And so the cycle goes.