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One recent morning, I felt the touch of a ghost.

On a predawn day, I sat at the windowsill among leaves as soft as spirits to explore thought unmitigated by circumstance -- to be immersed in one of those brief, blessed, occasional forays into all things introspective that, by their very nature, typically propel me to write.

I turned to pen and pad for reasons both varied and vexing, exploring that vague and strange emotional connection between that which I feel and that which I put to paper. What is the ghost that inspired me that day, I wondered. What was my morning's muse?

To a large degree, at least within me, creativity is certainly as mysterious as any ghost. It seems to dance to a music that it alone can hear -- a rhythm and rhyme of its own making. And that morning the music was as clear and resonant as the crisp air outside my windowsill. That morning's ghost -- my spectral and mysterious morning muse -- was the magic of another Southwest Virginia fall.

Once many years ago in elementary school I read a description of fall as "the dead season," and thought it hogwash then just as now. Many things decay in the fall, this is no doubt true. Green grass goes golden and then brown. Leaves die and drop.

But here in Southwest Virginia at least, fall is a season that in dying there is also living -- living in the burning hues of red and magenta and orange that burst onto this picturesque landscape for a few weeks each year.

Here, fall is a time and place that rightly inspires so many postcards, so many visitors, so many early evening picnics on red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, so many hikes and drives through the rural bucolic back country where vivid characters strut and fret upon nature's stage like a Shakespearean morality tale -- playing the parts of country inns and hot-cider stands and white church steeples that reach from ground to God.

Oddly, even though I was born and raised here, I'm a bit of a sojourner of sorts in these parts now, visiting the area each fall from my new home in northern New England where I have lived for the past 10 years.

Yet, to quote the great sage Calvin (the cartoon character; not the theologian), "my biggest problem is that my lips move when I think," and thus each time I open my mouth up north -- which I am the first to admit happens all too frequently -- my accent clearly uncovers my Southwest Virginia roots with characteristic candor.

I came to New England with my wife to stay for a year, or maybe two or three, returning to Virginia each October to stay connected to the land we love. And a decade later here we are still making the trip to Southwest Virginia every year, often agreeing that fall is one of the primary reasons why we love it so.

I'm convinced that to love a place or not is a concept that seems deceptively simple at the surface but is archetypal underneath.

There must be some connection behind it all, something sacred we don't understand. Whatever it is that makes us connect or not to where we've been planted, it is ubiquitous and universal, and seems somehow linked to the seasons that take us through time.

By my own empirical observations, many other people here also love Southwest Virginia in large part because of the season of fall. I know of many in the area who summer in the city or winter in the Keys, but I know nary a soul who will fall anywhere on Earth but here.

Fall is fine in many other places on Earth, of course. New England is nice this time of year, too. To me the season just seems to have a touch of pixie dust in Southwest Virginia. The two go together like beans and cornbread, as they might say back home in Giles County.

The spirit of fall permeates everything here, affecting far more than just the colorful fields of foliage that look like abstract expressionist paintings and bring in leaf gawkers from far and wide.

Even my beloved New River seems to take on a new personality this time of year. Like a line of connect the dots drawn by Mother Nature and Father Time, the New flows on and on seemingly ad infinitum, giving life to the towns and peoples along its banks.

And when the weather turns crisp, and when fall comes once again, the water seems to celebrate it as much as the leaves.

Once I watched a crisp brown maple fall from a tree, parachute onto the surface of the river, lie there quietly a moment or two, and then slowly drift among the rocks for what seemed like an eternity. Unable to turn away my gaze, at that moment I realized that I was just another leaf gawker, too.

So here is one more leaf gawker's ode to a Southwest Virginia fall, which that morning I soaked up along with the coming of the rising sun.

I saturated with it until I seeped. The paper upon which I wrote was left wet with wandering thought. And as I sipped another cup of coffee, I caught the sound of the crackling leaves tumbling down the road outside the window.

Amazing thing, those leaves. Loud as machine gun fire. Soft as spirits. Gentle as the touch of a ghost.

Ken Davis is a graphic designer in Vermont. A former writer for The Roanoke Times, he is a Virginia Tech graduate and southwest Virginia native.