A steady shimmer of rain. At the woods’ edge, the first fall fashions have arrived, two maples trading their faded green for salmon.
fall foliage
The yellow is moving up from the goldenrod to the birches, tulip trees and elms. A red-bellied woodpecker’s shrill calls end in a trill.
The trees were full of warblers just before I came out, the resident naturalist informs me. Walnut leaves flutter down like shed feathers.
Next to the mostly brown woods, the great yellow blob of the lilac seems almost scandalous. It trembles as small birds pass through it.
Warm morning after a cold night, and the oaks are shedding leaves: a dry sound as they hit lower branches, like the ticking of many clocks.
Leaves still cling to the tall locusts—threadbare coats of gold beneath the fourth-quarter moon, pale as a discarded toenail clipping.
Unsettled weather with rare glimpses of sun, but the leaves go on falling: some spiraling, some pirouetting, some in a graceful glide.
Gray rain ripples the air—November’s fur blurring the last splashes of bright October: salmon-colored cherry leaves, a vivid limb of maple.
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.
With the walnuts bare, I can see the aspens again—now a flickering orange, like that tree in the Mabinogion burning without being consumed.
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.
Pileated woodpeckers fly back and forth cackling, their wings black and white as newsprint amid the cathedral-window colors of the leaves.
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.
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.