Hey, it's Major.

For the next two weeks, our guest's host spot will be filled by none other than Slowdown producer Micah Kilbon.

I'll be back on November 25th.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

My neighbor and friend Mary called to say, no one does autumn like Vermont. She had just gotten

back from a weekend trip of leaf peeping with friends. I'd always thought that phrase alluded to

mischievous. Touring New England's fall foliage is typically innocuous and magical. Mary's enthusiasm led me on my next voyage to my

adopted home state to drive the back roads. I rented a car at Boston Logan and hit a void highway

on my navigation app. My destination, the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

The colors through Massachusetts and New Hampshire was stunningly beautiful. Rolling lanes and

villages decked out in reds, oranges, yellows. Sunlight blazed through maples and oak.

Falling leaves set my windshield aflame.

Vermont bans billboards and any visual noise that might pollute the horizon. So to cross into the state is to penetrate some divine force field of nature. It is to feel yourself into a tourist

postcard or a live painting full of vibrant colors where a mountainside resembles a box full of

fruit loops. But then my friend Wynne texted a warning.

Leaf peeping in full session, time your drive from Boston.

Turned out a thousand others also had the same idea of touring nature's color exhibition.

I hit unexpected traffic.

The drive stretched out for an additional two hours. We forcibly meandered and drove slow past white clabbard churches. Homes decorated with bright pumpkin,

scarecrows, reaves and garlands of yellow leaves. Part of the spectacle I suddenly felt very self-aware.

Today's poem captures our complex relationship with nature,

how we experience the sublime of the seasons,

...