It’s a fine November morning here on the mountain. Ol’ Antonio really nailed it with his Autumn piece. It’s as if he was here when he composed it. In fact, if you’d like a soundtrack to this post, check this:
I rambled through the fields on my morning walk, relishing in the scent of rain - near past, and promised - and fallen leaves. The sun was groggy, peeking out occasionally through the gathering clouds. All around, the trees burned with the glory of November.
From a pause atop a hill, I eyed the stream valley I had climbed from, and wondered Why isn’t there a “Tree of the Year” award?
(There probably is, and I shudder to imagine the politics of the arborist society that votes on the matter. You know how people are. The Zelkova faction overthrew the Hickory bloc last year, but the Gingko party is biding it’s time, waiting to capitalize on the division, and return to it’s former favor with urban planners.)
Whatever.
Imagined drama aside, here’s my Tree of the Year award.
The Maples have been bringing it.
The silver maple right outside my window is shedding yellow leaves. The ground is quite thick with them. It’s Maple colleagues have been resplendent this season. A Red has particularly distinguished himself, aflame at the edge of the bee field, and mentioned in Friday’s post with Eva Cassidy’s Autumn Leaves. A well-timed gust off Long Mountain made my jaw hit the floor. A thousand embers fell from the branches.
Further up the path, pools of gold gather on the dark earth, as the younger maples relinquish their grip on summer. If trees could scrapbook, this is how they’d do it, spreading their leaves, and memories, on the ground. “Hey, remember that July noon? Put it right next to that night with the fireflies.”
The Hickories are making colors talk.
Their orange-tinged amber leaves have a hearty intensity, matching the strength of their branches. Equally stunning against a blue sky or misty gray, they make up for their quiet summer green. If fall colors could talk, the hickories would shout.
Across the yard from the silver maple, a pecan begins a subtle transformation. Also a member of the hickory family, it’s eschewed the extroversion of it’s Shagbark and Pignut cousins, turning a quiet limeade instead.
The Sycamores have my vote this year.
They had always been somewhere else. Viewed outside the car window, speckled white branches waving from the farm creeks along I-81, or wayside on long bike trips.
But now, I’ve gotten to know some here at the mountain. They live at the edge of a pasture. In the summer, their wide leaves offered a cool shade next to the laughing stream, a place to dream about what might have been. Fireflies danced among them on those late June evenings, gems in the crown of the Forest Kings.
Their white branches look like a painting, something Andy Wyeth would do. Many a gloomy midwinter Sunday I spent at the art gallery back in the city, with hands folded behind my back, peering at the masterpieces on the wall. “Well, I guess that’s what a tree looks like, but, I dunno.”
Here, by the stream, their branches imitate art.
Their now russet leaves blanket the path to the back field, the way up the mountain, and to Adventure.
I’d be wise to listen.
Josh
PS. I just checked out an Oxford collection of essays. Y’all are in for it. But seriously, thanks for reading!
PPS. The Oak contingent is rightly offended at the glaring omission. We’ll have to get to them soon. The Persimmon deserves mention as well.
Nice observations. It is a hickory year in the people's republic of southern Maryland, all yellows, with oaks adding a few branches of rusty red here and there for contrast. The maples in south central PA were early and not as brilliant this year. All good things come to an end, and the leaves are falling fast. Need one of those Diesel powered turbine blowers!