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Show Sttirnlke a Venim by Teri Gomes It all begins with Miners Day Never mind what the calendar says the change begins this week. Any Parkite who has lived in town more than one full year knows that Miners Day (i.e. Labor Day elsewhere) is the official, local start of fall. By now, we've all spotted the trees up at the resort that can't wait to begin their autumn show. Clumps of orange and yellow will soon take over the hillside in a riot of patchwork colors. And this week, all of the precious little Park City schoolchildren school-children returned to the place where their mothers most love to sec them school. In fact, if you listened carefully sometime around 8:30 on Tuesday morning, you could have hard a collective sigh from parents who had sent their youngsters off to school and who then sat down to a cup of coffee without cartoons or sibling squabbling going on. On Sunday night, out in the Meadows, summer ended with a block party held in a cul-de-sac, which actually is called a court here. Many more people came to the party than actually lived on the block, er, court. Children chased balls and each other, and flew high in the air on a trampoline. Adults ate, drank and played volleyball with a vengeance. The long, lazy days we had enjoyed so in the real summer ended all too soon Sunday night and we were forced to eat in the semidarkness. On top of that, the weather turned windy and cold and we took cover in a new house under construction in the cul-de-sac, er court, with the permission of the owners who were not yet at the party. For dessert, we moved into Val and Steve Chin's house, where talk of football and children's bedtimes became the topics of conversation, depending upon your sex and location in the room. There was nothing really extraordinary about the evening. No one person or group dominated the conversation, nobody's kids were awful, nobody fixed any food that would put the folks in Deer Valley out of business. But it was a warm evening with good friends and new friends and people we don't know too well. It was a comfortable way to feel like I was really back home again after what felt like such a long time away. Earlier in the week, we had enjoyed dinner at the home of our good friends, Tom and Lenore. These are the kind of friends that, as a writer, I would have had to invent if they didn't actually exist. As regular readers of this column know, Tom and Lenore often find their way into print here. Lenore had fixed a wonderful Italian welcome-back-to-town meal. We sat in the dining room enjoying the last warm hours of the day. The last very, very warm hours that day. So warm that Lenore asked if she should open the door. "Yes," Tom replied, "unless you want us to lose weight while we are eating." By the time Lenore brought out the dessert, which was a meringue mountain with fresh raspberries and kiwi fruit, the door had been open for a couple of hours and the light of the day wasn't forcing us to turn on the chandelier for light. At that time, all of the bugs that had . made their way into the room in the past few hours made their presence known. Tom was not about to sit by and let these flying creatures ruin his dessert, so he quickly left the table. He returned looking like something out of "Ghostbusters," armed with a canister vacuum cleaner to combat the invaders. He took the long hose and started sucking bugs off the light fixture. He was a man possessed. I laughed till I cried, but I did manage two helpings of dessert in the meantime. And it struck a vein with me this really is one of my favonte times in Park City. I love the fall colors, I love the kids back in school, the football talk, the chance to catch up on friendships that have been on vacation for a few months. I like the slight bite in the mornings now and the . needto wear, a sweater, as well as socks with my tennis Soon enough, the town will be abuzz with political activity and fail festivities and reasons to be intense and . serious again, But for now, it's nice to laugh and hug and enjoy this big family I hat masquerades as a town. |