a good vintage

winemakers understand that there are good vintages and poor vintages. in the north, there are good fall color years, and poor ones. the good ones do not produce anything as lasting as wine, but their short lived shouts of color echo for several years to come. this had been a good vintage year. it should reverberate for a while to come.

white oak leaves in autumn

making of a mural

i have been tinkering with this photo all day. a friend of mine wants to make it into a 9 x 8 foot mural for the entryway of her newly renovated home. i have been resizing, and cropping into 2 foot wide strips, so i can upload to spoonflower and have it printed as wallpaper. the process has been tedious, which makes me question why i do these commissions. ok, not really. i know i’m going to take my first glance, and give my friend a big, fake, COVID-era air hug, and thank her for suggesting such a beautiful idea.

beach rocks

the same but different

i am fascinated by the year to year variation in fall leaf colors. one year our maple is a blaze of orange, the next year it is entirely yellow. along my driveway right now is a maple with leaves so pale they look drained of blood. our mountain ash is usually a big yellow flame and this year it dropped its leaves with almost no transition from green to brown. i don’t know if it’s water, or cold, or nutrition, but it adds to my feeling, whether scientifically justified or not, that trees are near-sentient fellow beings, and that, in a way we are too out of touch to understand, they express themselves.

red oak leaves in autumn

beads and wax

it’s easy to think of this leaf as dead, but it has retained enough of its waxy living surface to turn water into beads of glass. there’s no lesson here. i’m not drawing any conclusions about life or death. but i’m suddenly very interested in why those droplets seem to scatter so evenly across the surface of the leaf. dammit i thought this was going to be an easy one. wikipedia here i come.

autumn oak leaf with raindrops

blood red

i intended to talk about the beauty of mid-autumn sumac in this post. but in the meantime, a strange neighborhood dog wandered into our open screen door tonight, possibly lured by the smell of roast pork shoulder in the oven, and our 25 pound puggle decided he was just the knight in shining fur to save our family from the horrors of hungry, and probably friendly, black poodles. in the ensuing melee, jack received two puncture wounds behind his ear and on his neck, both the color of one of these sumac leaves. he already received a raw marrow bone in acknowledgement of his service, and will get some extra love tonight, on the couch in front of the fire, accompanied by stories of his selfless bravery.

autumn sumac leaves