Just outside the window on the eastern side of my living room, there grows a plant. The beginning of the season called “fall” was more than a month ago and recently, after a freeze warning, there was a rime of frost on the roof of the garage. Despite the challenging weather, this plant continues to bloom.
“You need to prune some more dead stuff off this plant, Dad,” my youngest daughter told me sometime in September. My friend, when asked, said something to the same effect (sorry, Cassidy) and I had clipped a few dead buds from this plant that I have named a “rose tree.” After my surgery on it, some other growths bloomed, all of them appearing to be little roses. I cannot be sure, having little experience with plant names, but the stems of the red blooms have the “poke-your-finger” things that are common to roses. But the blooms themselves seem impervious to my indifferent pruning and the vagaries of the weather: They just keeping busting out red, all over.
On my short walk to Ellenberger Park, I have occasionally been startled by the beauty of the colors of the leaves on the trees. On the neighborhood page that I belong to, someone grooved on the colors of the leaves, and someone else knocked that groove by noting that the early colors are the result of a drought. (What? No 60’s people here? No “groovin’” on a Sunday afternoon?) Despite that weather alert, I am still stopped by the glorious colors displayed by the trees in the neighborhood. There is a bush – or is it a tree? – on the western edge of my front porch that House Sparrows hide in. In early fall, a Carolina Wren spent some seconds in that bush. I saw it from a window, but once it saw me, it flew to another place. The bush was once green all over, but now displays many bright red leaves. The birds burst from the bush when I come outside to sit in the chairs, flying to a larger, less colorful tree a short distance away. I look at the bush now, wondering how it is that I did not notice the leaves changing from green to bright red.
In my neighbor’s back yard, the grass is now littered with gold. My neighbor’s trees gift me with some of that gold and when my daughter gathers the gold and bags it, my granddaughter empties the bag and jumps into the pile. Robert Frost wrote “Nature’s first green is gold,” but it would seem that, as nature falls into winter, gold is the last hue.
My friend Nancy used to call me to invite me to meet with her in Brown County Indiana, to enjoy the changing colors of the trees. I ventured there once when our mutual friend Lisa was visiting from her home in Florida. We walked the paths of our new friendships and Nancy showed us where she had strolled with her late husband. When we were quiet, we could hear the whisper of the leaves beneath our shoes. I took a picture of Nancy pressing a bright red leaf into her blonde hair.
I have also taken pictures of my youngest granddaughter, almost fully covered in gathered leaves; the reds, yellows and golds of the leaves almost mute the pink of the jacket she wears. Her delighted smile outshines the colors she frolics in. Her mother uses a leaf blower to corral “the autumn leaves, of red and gold,” which have drifted past her window and arrayed themselves onto the ground in a tableau of the colors of fall.
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