november is here... well almost

I like to forget what month it is.  I realize that we have almost 10 days of october left but as I am missing out on Halloween I've decided to forgo the end of October and move straight into November.  Plus we've just gotten our first winter rains here in Northern California so I feel fully justified in this calendrical adjustment.
Today I drove up to Kenwood in Sonoma county under the rainy skies, passing by fields of grape vines, their leaves turning a fall yellow.  The hills are yellow too, that ruddy yellow of dried grass, but a couple more days of rain will turn them their winter silvery gray.  As I drove  I was thinking about the normal descriptors people use for gray: gun metal (or maybe that is for cars), steel, aluminum, etc.  I decided that the sky was the color of that pale almost white ash that develops in flakes on burning logs, ash gray.  And the light was flat, pressing the hills into a painted backdrop of burnished gold grass with the dark olive stain of oak trees lining the clefts in the hillsides.  It was a pretty drive.