Reflections of Fall

Mid-October rain has been plentiful. Ensuring that, despite low levels of ground frost tender plants have not yet succumbed to the finality of the season. Unbelievable, how quickly summer has faded into a gentle early Autumn. A beautifully and much-appreciated, prolonged season for all of that, with more than our anticipated share of balmy days and nights, despite the calendar.

The better to appreciate just for a little longer what we are about to lose, however temporarily. In the icy-white days of winter the memory of these last still-mild days will be obliterated by the reality of a monochromatic landscape. Although we'll enjoy the winter season as we always do, it is with a palpable sense of melancholy that we witness the dying of summer, the slide into Fall, the advent of another year's growing season slipped by.

But it's difficult at this stage to feel mournful about our impending loss. The air is bracing and the senses reel at the brilliance of transcendent beauty above our heads, the leaves on their arc of departure, first turning warm and mellow shades of tan, orange, yellow, lime green, and scarlet. Ambling through the woods on a windy day the leaves pelt our bare heads.

Although it's another overcast day, with just a brief hiatus in the day's rainfall, the colours appear somehow more intense than they do under a clear sky. Perhaps it's the combination of the rain having drenched everything so thoroughly and whatever light there is bouncing off the slick wet foliage. Wind picks up and detaches even more leaves, falling like confetti around us. The wind also encourages rain-laden foliage to release droplets upon us.

The acid-sweet fragrance of tannin surrenders to us as our boots crush the scattered leaves of maple, oak, ash and poplar. The under-layer of leaves now turned a uniform muddy compost-in-transition, the upper layer still reflecting the bright insouciance of those still clinging tenaciously to their branches. Nudging to memory the many similar wanderings through this season of Autumns past.

We're confronted by a resplendent arras of brilliant foliage, and we revel in the tapestry re-visited. The bees are gone, the butterflies, the beetles and the dragonflies. Squirrels roust about everywhere in the underbrush, zipping up tree trunks, securing their winter caches. Squadrons of geese spread through the sky on their southern journey just as robins are gathering for their own departure.

The warblers, the hummingbirds have long departed. We can be assured that the chickadees and the woodpeckers will remain steadfast to the oncoming winter landscape. We'll still hear and glimpse the bright foliage of cardinals through this sere season, but the others that so gladdened our sight and our souls are soaring past this time and this place.