Well, chalk another one up to global warming...
When I was a kid, we had MUCH colder winters/early falls here west of Houston... I remember MANY times walking down the drive to catch the schoolbus and the puddles having a sheet of ice over them... We've seen that ONCE in the last ten years... and it's been nearly ten years since we've had a genuine ice storm through here either (though that's not a bad thing). When I was five (which would have been '76) my folks were gonna take me trick or treating, but a blue norther blew in mid-morning on Halloween and it was hovering around freezing at sundown and fell from there, so I never got to trick-r-treat as a kid since they never offered to take me again.
When I was a kid, these early frosts would hit the Chinese tallow trees that grow quite commonly here (escaped to the wild) and turn them every color you can imagine... beautiful scarlet reds, sunshine yellows, gold, bright orange, even maroonish reds, and every hue in between! I used to LOVE seeing the fall colors as a kid.
By the time I was in junior high, our winters were MUCH milder and frosts came later into November, even in December. By that time, the trees had already either dropped their leaves or they got old and turned brown from light frosts that weren't enough to bring out the brilliant colors... so fall has changed here from a colorful affair to a dull brown mess in just my lifetime.
Heck, a few years ago we didn't even get a freeze ALL WINTER LONG... a few 'frosty' mornings where it didn't even get below freezing but there was a bit of frost on the dry grass and leaves and truck windshield, but that was it. Not much even of that... I had fields with grain sorghum (which unlike corn will continue to grow after it's mowed down after harvest, even after plowing, so long as one of its fibrous roots manages to hold in the soil, even if the crown is inverted by the plow...) Usually frost will finally kill any remaining sorghum plants that escape the plow and re-volunteer in the field, but this one year (98 or 99 I think) it didn't even freeze hard enough to kill it out-- there was still volunteer sorghum growing in the fields in late January!!
There was a touch of color this year... we had a couple "fairly early" (for our standard weather pattern these days) "cold snaps"-- hardly freezes but decent frosts anyway. But, as I type this, the air conditioner is running and it bumped up against 80 degrees today... This past weekend I helped my brother prune his trees in his yard, as he has several cedars and Chinese Tallows that my Grandmother planted a half-century or so ago, that have grown to the point they're endangering the house-- he rented a cherry picker for the weekend and I acted as spotter and limb dragger for him while he ran the chainsaw in the bucket, and I stayed on the ground and darn near froze in the damp east wind coming in off the Gulf behind the cold front of a couple days earlier that saw temps down in the mid-30's overnight...
If you don't like the weather in Texas-- wait 30 minutes-- it'll change...
later! OL JR
PS. Prettiest leaves I've seen was the fall colors in the mountains of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee...
Never been to New England... too far into Yankeeland for me...
