Autumn Leaves

According to the news, it is peak season for fall leaves along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and people are driving along it, looking for the fall color.

And if you are looking for pretty, you will find it, but the pretty requires distance. Scan the hillsides and you see reds and yellows. Perfect for a calendar illustration. Warmth and glow on the insides.

But come closer and you are forced to recognize, it is dissolution you are staring at. The leaves are dying, drying out, falling and giving up for the year.

I don’t want to put too fine a point to it all, but now that I am 78, and seeing in my body its own slow dissolution, what I recognize in those sere leaves is the spotting, drying out and wrinkling of my own skin. Feeling at one with nature is all fine and dandy when you keep to the generalities, but now that I see myself in those leaves, I feel at one with nature in a whole new and more sobering sense.

But, the thing is, when I look more closely at the crinkling leaves, they are still beautiful. They aren’t just color; they are texture and shape also, and those reveal themselves in new ways at the change in seasons.

And so, I took my camera out to the side of the house this morning and made a few quick “notes.” This is the reality of fall. In the spring and summer, the leaves are all rather a uniform and boring green. Little difference between one maple leaf and the next on the stalk. But come autumn and each declares an individuality — its own bruises, deformities, torn spots — and its multiplicity of color.

There is a glory to that wastage. A shout out to the universe. A final “Notice me.” The leaf may not be at its most productive, chlorophyll-driven  season, making the sustenance for the tree, but it is still announcing itself. Part of the whole. Worth your attention.

And so, here are a few images made this morning, with the temperature in the mid-40s, and scattered clouds in the sky, with fall chugging along toward the cold of winter. A few leaves, single or in crowds, that sing that ambivalent song.

Click on any image to enlarge