I lived in Colorado Springs in a house I had built by a local contractor on Cheyenne Mountain. This is a picture of that house. This picture is grainy because I had to take a picture of an old picture. You can see it was surrounded by Scrub Oak. So there were lots of leaves in the fall, but I never had to rake, as that house often got such fierce winds I thought the house was being ripped off the hill. Gusts would actually cause a cracking sound in the windows. I often wondered where the leaves went.

Chinook Winds - according to Wikipedia, Chinook winds or simply Chinooks, are high winds in the interior West of North America, where the Canadian Prairies and Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountain ranges. A strong Chinook can make snow one foot deep almost vanish in one day. The snow partly melts and partly evaporates in the dry wind. On rare occasions, Chinook winds generated on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains have reached or passed the Mississippi River.

Denizen - a plant or animal that inhabits a particular region.

I recently was asked to Judge a poetry contest called "Kansas Voices" sponsored by the Winfield Arts and Humanities Council. So, like my leaves, my poetic experience has traveled into Winfield, or so the link I imagined here in this poem.

The poem is simple abab rhymed quatrains in an 8-6 meter,

The original picture was taken by the author in the fall of 1986. I do miss that house. It was at an elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level, and 1,000 feet above Colorado Springs.

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