Color in the mountains.

Summer is over.

We all enjoyed it. But the eternal Old Mountain Man Winter will soon be upon us again with his frosty breath, black ice and heating bills...

The changes as we move from warm to cool weather will give new life to the landscape. The morning fog, especially, will have a personality to it - a personality that has been absent for most of the summer. Soon, with temperatures in the upper 30's and lower 40's, the Clinch River and its dozens of tiny tributaries cloak the green landscape with a pre-dawn mist that reminds me of pictures of Ireland or Scotland. The orchestra of bugs and frogs that now keep me awake at night will be replaced by silence - dead silence.

And of course the trees will be changing colors. All over the hillsides the oaks, maples, poplars, etc. will be testing the ability of the human eye to discern the different hues and shades of red and yellow, gold and green. It is an annual show that many residents of the deep south (where most trees are pine trees) envy and come to the mountains to see.

Buttercups seem to take over whole mountain sides in early summer... Horses are common in Tazewell County.

But while the annual spectacle of a landscape clothed in color is probably the highlight of the year, many people don't understand that there is always color in the mountains.

And a trip to the mountains in the summer is not a consolation prize for someone who can't make it in October.

People don't associate summer with color in the mountains. But if we limit the discussion only about the flowers that grow wild in our region, it becomes clear that summer can be very colorful in Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia.

The buttercups and dandilions come out first and it seems like the very fabric of reality has turned yellow.

My wife thinks that dandilions are weeds. I've tried to re-educate her, tried to explain to her that the color is beautiful and that dandilions lend character to a yard. But on this particular issue, at least, she is unreasonable. And since I love her dearly, I have accepted this weakness in her: we paid the children by the dandilion this spring to pick them before they turned to seed. At 2 dandilions for a penny we coughed up about $35; that's about 7000 dandilions.

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