this maple leaf appears as conflicted about the onset of fall as i am. wait, it’s still sort of summer. wait, no it’s not. well, ok, it’s sort of in-between. sure but look at how low the sun is. yeah but it just hit seventy degrees today. well, you know that won’t last for long. true, but the grass is still green. granted, but the cattails are brown. well, how about the fishermen still out on the lake. yes, but listen to all those leaf blowers on the wind. oh, fine. you win.

maple leaf in october

saint paul, minnesota

we knew this day would come. you can’t decide to raise six chickens quasi-free-range among 30 acres of northern hardwoods full of coyotes, raccoons, eagles, hawks, owls, ospreys, weasels and foxes, and expect everybody to just get along indefinitely. in fact it is a wonder that all six of our girls lasted through a year and a half of bossy and entitled quasi-freedom. rue was not the bossiest, or the most entitled (glimmer wins both of those awards), but she was the least containable. she always found her way out of every pen, cage, and run, and we would find her most days ambling past steve’s home office window, or scratching for bugs with her fluffy butt in the air some hundred yards up into the woods, or wandering through the open front door and pecking crumbs from the kitchen floor, while her sisters searched in vain for a way out of their chicken wire enclosure. so it makes sense that when the fox came for a visit, he would run into rue first. we found her lying very still and peaceful right next to where steve chased the fox off, after he released glimmer, his second intended victim, from between his jaws and let her sprint back toward the house only a few scratches and puncture wounds the worse for her experience. but it was too late for rue, and we will miss her.

feathers from rue, our golden buff chicken

saint paul, minnesota

when i traveled through europe in college in the 1980s, president reagan was not popular on that side of the atlantic. it was common to sew a canadian flag on our backpacks in order to avoid trouble. i also happened to be dating a canadian hockey player at the time. then when my husband and i went on our honeymoon, we drove up the saint lawrence and stayed in quebec city. these maple leaves have me wondering if i’m not just a little bit canadian.

maple leaves in mid-october

saint paul, minnesota

i once heard a great story from john dolan, the photographer who shot my martha stewart feature. he was talking about a creative director who always advised styiling a photograph meticulously, and then actually physically shaking up the elements of the photograph so that they landed just slightly randomly and disarranged. in the case of these stems, i had them beautifully woven into a grid, and then they fell onto the kitchen floor into this accidentally random pattern, which was, of course, much more interesting than my meticulous weaving. art by accident. i’ll take it.

seed head fronds of an unidentified common weed

rice creek regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

it’s easy to think of the northern climate as full of a limited and sterile beauty: the circumpolar greens, blacks, and whites of alaska, canada, scandinavia, greenland, and siberia. minnesota partakes more of that boreal north than the temperate middle, much less the tropical south, but in an hour on a fall day, here’s what i was able to gather without really much effort: oak, maple, willow, aspen, sumac, birch, elm, and virginia creeper, in green, yellow, orange, red, tan, brown, and gray. i wonder what would have happened if i’d taken a two hour walk.

leaves from one october walk

grass lake trail, shoreview, minnesota