It is peak fall color season up here in the Southern Appalachians, and tourists are driving up and down the parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway that are now open after Hurricane Helene washed away portions of the roadway.
And most of those fall colors are great swashes of yellows, reds and duns like a sea swell of hue. It’s hard not to love all that pageantry. The annual dropping of the fall curtain on another year.
But that view from a distance hides the truth of the season: Every one of the leaves that make up the unnumbered wash, is individually distinct and rotting. The glory of color is really also a death shiver.
If you pay attention to the detail, the separate leaves, both still hanging on to their petioles, of flattened on the ground and pavement, there is a different kind of beauty to be had. Not a pretty one, but a beautiful one. The colors are not uniform, but are textured and ringed. You can walk through the pile of dried leaves on the sidewalk, hearing their crunch under your foot, and hardly notice them. They are no longer functioning.
But you can pay attention. You can look at them as separate canvases made by happenstance into abstract art. Each leaf is worth your notice. Each bunch is a design.
Thursday is trash collection day in this part of Asheville in the North Carolina mountains. And each week, I drag the wheely-bin down to the road for pick-up. It is a routine walk down the steep driveway in the morning and another back up with the dumpster in the afternoon.
And now, in November, I see the trip as a kind of gallery tour of those leaves. This morning, I took my point-and-shoot camera with me and stopped along the way to notice the exhibit. I’ve made scores of images, each one a fresco of shape, color, texture and pattern.
I wrote my last blog entry about an earlier collection of photographs. But this is all a great theme-and-variations of botanical tunes. And I cannot help marveling at all I find in such a simple walk up and down my driveway. I am sure there is nothing special about the driveway. I could walk anywhere in the neighborhood, wander into downtown, or up the Blue Ridge Parkway, pull over and walk through the piles of fallen leaves, and fine an infinite number of such paintings.
The important part isn’t that nature is so rich, colorful and textural, but rather that any of us can take time and pay attention. I don’t want to dump on the digital world; I spend enough of my own time on the iPad. But the fact is, the world uninflected by pixels or text offers enough to keep occupied indefinitely.
But you do have to rather slow down and look. Most of us use our eyes merely to see — see and name what we see and move forward with the name rather than the sight — but looking is infinitely rewarding.
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