Tag: autumn

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Driving through rural Mississippi, I felt my shoulders drop. Suddenly I was smiling. On a dappled road between weedy hedgerows and piney woods and cotton fields and country graveyards and shabby crossroads towns without so much as a blinking yellow light, I was singing along with Tyler Childers and smiling like a fool.

I was home.

I don’t mean literally. I come from Lower Alabama peanut-farming stock, not Mississippi cotton farmers. The first time I ever set foot in Mississippi, I was 22 and on my way to New Mexico, eager to shake the red dirt of home from my sandals as fast as I could manage.

But those small clapboard churches where cars park right on the grass, and those rough farm roads yielding to blacktop, and those blooming, insect-bedazzled margins between fields, and that splintered light pouring down from the pines — they were all telling me I was home. And I was so happy to be home.

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”

I believe she’s right — “Joy is not made to be a crumb”— but for a certain kind of Southerner, it’s impossible not to question this particular happiness. This place has caused so much suffering. How could loving it fail to provoke questions? And yet the sight of cotton growing in fields made me happy. For those few hours, even knowing the terrible, blood-soaked history of cotton, I couldn’t help it. Happiness rose in me like an anthem. […]

Drive down a highway in your own homeland, the golden autumn light pouring around you and the golden leaves tumbling in the passing rush of air, and tell me your heart doesn’t fill up with love and longing. Tell me you could keep your heart from filling up with love to the throbbing point of longing. Even a heart entirely broken comes back for more breaking when the source of heartbreak is home. […]

I will keep on loving the place that made me, for I seem to have no choice about that. Because when the muted gold of the pine needles and the extravagant yellow leaves of the elms and the mottled orange leaves of the sugar maples and the shining red leaves of the black gum trees are all falling out of the sky in the passing wind, it always feels exactly like a benediction.

—Margaret Renkl, from “Notes on Going Home” (NY Times, November 20, 2023)

DK Photo @ Cove Island Park @ 6:25 am this morning. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk (in the cold wind chill) here.

T.G.I.F. Wanna be here, now.

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Photo by Geraint Smith Photography: “This week, my favorite cottonwood tree in all the state, and random black and whites on the road in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I think the colors on this cottonwood peaked this morning (Oct 24, 2023). I never tire of seeing it whenever I commute to or from Taos, in all seasons.” (Thank you Beth)

Sunday Morning

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Pictures from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park here.

It’s like falling in love. The magic can’t last.

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Autumn is sneaky. Although I’m always on the lookout for it, always primed for it, it bursts into its ephemeral majesty so quickly that I’m always startled by it, too. A tree that I remember as green from yesterday’s walk is crimson today. A tree that I don’t remember at all has taken up residence on some tantalizing band of the color spectrum between orange and pink. My eyes widen and my heart swells — it’s like falling in love. It has that same seed of sadness, that same prickle of death. The magic can’t last.

I’ve lived in places where there’s little change in seasons, where the mercury moseys slightly upward or subtly downward but the landscape doesn’t refashion itself. There’s an argument for such modesty. It doesn’t demand as varied a wardrobe.

And to have the kind of autumn that I savor here in North Carolina means to be plunged into a winter with just enough cold on the worst days to test your mettle, to denude those trees and turn them skeletal. I have neighbors behind me whose house I can barely make out in July. In January, though, I can almost watch the football games on the big-screen television in their lavishly windowed great room.

But that’s January. This is early November, when the leaves that haven’t yet lost their grip are making a brilliant statement, taking a final bow. Autumn in places that have a real autumn teaches you to live in the moment, to open yourself to the world around you, to pay homage, to pay heed. Fail that lesson and you just might miss the whole spectacle, which can retreat as suddenly and stealthily as it arrives. You’re left with regret. It’s a sorry cousin to remembrance.

— Frank Bruni, from “On a Personal Note” (NY Times, November 3, 2022)

Photo by DK @ Daybreak. 59° F. 6:30 to 6:50 am. November 1, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from Tuesday morning’s walk here.

…clouds might start to come in and they were gently autumnal; they made the world look quietly soft

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By the middle of October, the foliage was beautiful. It seemed that the colors had arrived somewhat late, and because there had been so little rain for so long people thought maybe this was why the trees were shy and would not change their color so vibrantly. But then they did! Then they did.

Here is a secret about the beauty of the physical world. My mother told me this when I was very small —  my real mother, not the nice mother I made up later to be with me — my real mother told me one day that the great landscape painters understood one thing: that everything in nature started from the same color. And I thought of this as I watched the leaves changing. You may think: Don’t be ridiculous! There are vibrant reds and yellows and greens! And there are. Yet, walking along the river, as I did more frequently now, but also walking down our narrow road, I saw this. That in the yellows and the reds and the greens, they were somehow springing from the same color. And it is hard to describe this, but as more leaves fell I saw this more clearly.  Everything seems to start with a kind of brown and it grows from there: The huge slabs of rocks that were on the side of the road were gray and brown, and the oak trees that turned russet were similar in color to the seaweed that I have described as being a coppery color, and the water, whether it is dark green or gray or brown, was of a similar hue.

I also noticed how, in the afternoons, clouds might start to come in and they were gently autumnal; they made the world look quietly soft as though it was already getting ready to tuck itself in for the night. I am only saying what a thing the physical world is!

— Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea: A Novel (Random House, September 20, 2022)

Photo: DK @ Brant Point, Nantucket. October 2, 2022 @ 7:21 am.  See more pictures from Brant point here.