UP Dreams: Distracted Driving--Nothing Rhymes with Orange!

I wonder how many poets there are in the UP. I am definitely not going to be one of them.

Because nothing rhymes with orange.

I wish you were here. I truly do. Because if you are reading this from some cornfield state, like Iowa, you will not be getting the full effect of this post. If, however, you are already IN the UP, you can stop reading now. If you want. Because unless you are a hermit, you've seen it, and you know what I am talking about.

I drove myself to Ontonagon today, something that is always going to be pretty risky. Because I AM a distracted driver. Big time. Normally, I am not in a hurry, unlike today, and I can pull over and take pictures of whatever strikes my fancy. My fancy gets stricken (struck?) by quite a few different things, actually, not the least of which is birds, as anyone who has read my post knows. I did see a turkey, five pheasants, lots of little birds which cannot be identified by someone driving the speed limit, and a whole murder (Look it up. It's a thing) of crows today, by the way.

Today was kind of a gloomy day...chilly, a little windy, but what really struck me (I mean really, really STRUCK me was

ORANGE.

I mean

ORANGE.

Honestly, orange has never been my favorite color (right up there with blue, somewhere). Well, today, my favorite color is orange. So much so that since I knew that I couldn't stop to take pictures on the way to Ontonagon today, I was wondering if I could post about it, maybe, by writing a poem. It distracted me almost the whole drive there. But, as you know, NOTHING rhymes with orange.

So, believe me, you are lucky. Because I am pretty sure I am not a poet. You are lucky because the person I was supposed to have an appointment with this afternoon in Ontonagon cancelled. So I was free to take the long, slow way home today. And I was careful, because I was REALLY distracted, trying to find just the right shades that represented just a teeny little fraction of a percent of all the beauty that distracted me today. So I didn't have to write a poem, after all. Instead, I pulled off the road, carefully, a whole bunch of times, just so I could show you THIS:

What did I tell you? Is orange your favorite color yet?

How about now? I take a picture of the Ontonagon River bridge every few days, and the scene is always different. Today, that ORANGE. Wow.

A whole crayon box full of oranges here...a couple miles out of Ontonagon

Like FIRE

Although I have to say, I like YELLOW, too!

I don't know what to say. Old houses are beautiful and picturesque and sad all at the same time. That orange tree in the background, though...WOW...that's not sad.

Unfortunately, it WAS a gloomy, chilly day, and the light was not good for taking pictures by the time I got most of the way home. I did take a few more that, while they don't exactly fit the orange theme, are pretty nice.