Isn’t ‘autumn’ a great word?  I always feel a little self-conscious when I say it instead of the comfortable, everyday word ‘fall.’  But the less used ‘autumn’ seems to confer specialness.  It sets this time apart from the rest of the year, the seasons of which are identified by plain names–winter, spring, and summer.  The only season with two names, fall has to be a stand-out.

     On this autumn morning I awoke to grey coolness and the pattering of rain drops on the skylights overhead.  I decided to go into the woods and have a look.  As I walked down the hill in my all-engulfing rain jacket, I felt in sync with the world around me.  Inside my clinging, wet covering, I too felt damp and grey, my thinking somber and slow. 

     In the light rain, the forest looked less colorful than it had just yesterday.  Was it the dull color of the day itself reflected in the leaves?  Or, with so many leaves now on the ground, is it just too much to ask of the ones still on the trees to brighten the woods?

     Even the red maples, one of my favorites, looked dull.  No longer crimson, the leaves now looked old, marred with bruises and rough places.  It seemed that, in their final days, the maple leaves had developed liver spots. 

     The leaves of another tree, the moosewood, or striped maple, looked worse than dull.  I had been noticing over the past couple of weeks that its leaves have not been aging well.  In fact, they looked as if they’ve been shot, beaten.  A week or so ago, the leaves of this slight forest tree were turning yellow, but in a strange way.  Instead of the green pigment fading away as with most trees, it looked as if it had been added here and there, in splotches on the yellowing leaves.  And today those splotches looked like bull’s eyes–dark circles of thinning leaf–ringed in green.  Around these ’bullet holes,’ the yellow too was diminishing, overtaken in places by an anemic brown.  And the leaves were wrinkling and falling.  They looked utterly defeated, done.  I wondered why the striped maple leaves are so ugly in their dying, so unlike the exuberant red-orange of the tupelos or even the dignified brown of the chestnut oaks.  

     As I walked, I observed that the leaves of some of the other trees, bushes, and small plants did not look the way I expected them to on a rainy day.  The dogwood leaves drooped, shut down.  And the euonymous leaves were folded up tight.  The leaves of the snake root had collapsed, resting against the plant’s stem.  Until this morning, it had been very dry here for quite a long time.  And now, despite the rain finally falling on them, the leaves of many forest plants still hadn’t gotten the word.  Will they rebound, once the roots on which they depend have also been well-watered?  Or after such a dry summer, has the time passed when they can be revived? 

     While the forest’s leaves, for different reasons, are less bright today than they have been, there is another source of vivid color in the woods–the berries.  Orangish serviceberries, bright red little barberries, dark red crabapples, and deep purple-black tupelo berries shine with color and life, even on a day when just about everything else in the forest seems subdued.–April Moore  

  

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 10:38 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.