Unsettled weather with rare glimpses of sun, but the leaves go on falling: some spiraling, some pirouetting, some in a graceful glide.
fall foliage
10/28/2015
Gray rain ripples the air—November’s fur blurring the last splashes of bright October: salmon-colored cherry leaves, a vivid limb of maple.
10/25/2015
The wind has made the leaves at the end of the porch draw into a circle. A red-tailed hawk soars over the house, flapping to stay aloft.
10/24/2015
With the walnuts bare, I can see the aspens again—now a flickering orange, like that tree in the Mabinogion burning without being consumed.
10/18/2015
The thermometer’s big arrow points straight at 0°C. It was too windy for frost, but fallen red maple leaves cradle white grains of ice.
10/15/2015
Pileated woodpeckers fly back and forth cackling, their wings black and white as newsprint amid the cathedral-window colors of the leaves.
10/14/2015
Color is creeping into the tall oaks: here a splash of deep orange, there a branch gone burgundy, and just above, a pale smudge of sun.
10/13/2015
A cold wind. The first holes have appeared in the golden wall of leaves at the woods’ edge, the winter-white, ridgetop sky leaking through.
10/7/2015
Falling birch leaves whirl and tumble through shafts of sunlight. The sine wave of a squirrel crossing the road’s ancient macadam.
10/1/2015
In the green and yellow woods, here and there a red branch. But the kinglets in the birches hide their ruby crowns under olive-green shocks.
9/30/2015
After the rain, a drying breeze, shrinking the wet spots around the leaves strewn across the porch floor. Yellow tips rise. Edges flutter.
9/29/2015
I wake from a dream of a pub that served nothing but wheat beer to endless rain on yellow leaves: birch and elm, walnut and tulip tree.
11/3/2014
The wind has stripped the treetops of most remaining leaves, flooding them with light. I watch the sine-wave flight of a far-off woodpecker.
11/1/2014
Through thinning treetops, I spot a red-tailed hawk flapping to gain altitude. Two red oak leaves spiral high over the yard.