Deep cold. The sound of wind mingling with the dull howl of distant jets. Two dead leaves pick this moment to finally let go and twirl up through their small oak into the clouds.
fall foliage
11/23/2023
Blue-gray layered with yellow-orange a half hour past sunrise. The creek is still singing about Tuesday’s rain, and the one oak at the woods’ edge that always holds onto its dead leaves hisses in the wind.
11/22/2023
Wet and overcast at sunrise. The forest floor with its carpet of leaves almost glows for a minute or two before subsiding into ordinary brown.
11/12/2023
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
11/8/2023
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
10/31/2023
As the moonlight fades, pale patches remain—a killing frost. The woods’ edge is nearly bare of leaves below the brick-red crowns of the oaks.
10/27/2023
Dark at sunrise, but only a sprinkle of rain. Up in the woods, a deer rustles through freshly fallen leaves, breakfasting on acorns.
10/26/2023
Sunrise: pink and orange in the sky as on the hillside. A white-breasted nuthatch punctuates a white-throated sparrow’s song.
10/24/2023
Clear and cold with a heavy inversion layer: sparrow sounds blend with beeping quarry trucks. In the dim light, all the autumn colors look like blood.
10/22/2023
After a windy night, the forest is looking decidedly threadbare in its coat of many colors, illuminated each time the sun finds a hole in the clouds.
10/19/2023
One degree above freezing and very still. I add my breath to the ground fog rising through yellow leaves into the sunlight.
10/18/2023
A flat white sky crossed by a crow. Woods’-edge chipmunks in a chipping contest. The color.
10/14/2023
The pleasing monotony of a cold autumn rain, drowning out all other sound except for a low throbbing in the distance. Leaves fall drunkenly, careening this way and that.
10/8/2023
Windy and cold. In the wall of leaves at the woods’ edge, the first few fragments of what will be my winter sky.