Statements Trees Make

There’s always been a love-hate relationship with me and Fall. I am the one that’s doing the loving and the hating … I love the crisp air, and the dew, the frost, the smell of wet soil, the apple and cinnamon candles, the stacks of pumpkins dressed up in “don’t shoot me” orange; I love all the colors, actually, and I hate the feeling of getting old.
I fall in love the easiest in the fall, and I don’t even tell myself to be careful anymore. I love the falling in love, and the love affair I develop, even if it’s just with a new food, a new book, my cats all over again, or an undeserving human… I love the lovin’. And I hate the aging…
Watching the leaves today, I gotta tell you: trees and people are alike. Their colors just about now give that away.
Some of them are puritans. They pick a color, just one, and they so agreeably turn ALL their leaves that color! Same shade. Uniformity. Spotless uniformity. All the same yellow…or the same red… All alike.
Others are “hippy” trees. All sorts of shades, and colors, a tie-dyed rainbow on the whole tree. They seem they can’t decide whether they want to stick with red, or yellow, or would much rather favor to not even turn, and they would like the green to stick around… They’re so confused, their edges turn brown and wrinkly from so much thinking and deciding…
Others are stubborn and look like humans that age well: when everything around is withered, they’re staying green. No, these are not coniferous. They’re oaks, and maples, and ashes, but they’re not ready to show age yet. They are stubbornly deep green, and they look like they don’t belong. Like they were just planted here, where it’s been Fall for a while, just a minute ago, and they look around, feeling out of place. You gotta think the others look at them with jealousy, just like we as humans look at that 60 year old with no wrinkles that runs a marathon and bikes 20 miles a day still. With spite and envy.
And there are the “artist” trees; the originals, that will not turn gold, not red, nor brown, no shade of those colors. They decide they will rather be their own unusual color, like … pink. And in the whole landscape they just show up like an open, bleeding wound, or like a scream: “ I AM PIIIINNNNKKKK”… You can’t ignore them! They surely are one of a kind! Flamboyant!
I find that I feel smaller when it’s getting to be fall, too. Maybe I shrink, like metal does, in the fall/ winter … Geese do the same, it seems… I had the hardest time catching them with the wings spread today. They looked cold, and humble (yes, geese did!!), and they looked gloomy, they were muttering to me to leave them alone. I disturbed and intruded!
With nostrils full of fresh, cold, crisp air, with shoes full of wet NC clay, with camera filled with voyeur pictures, and with my arms filled with golden leaves, I came home. Another love-hate affair has started. I feel old, and in love once again. I think I am going to warm up my apple strudel now … and sigh while sinking in a chair with a book…
Enjoy the voyeurism, here:
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