Autumn Glory
I make the sharp right turn and my stomach tightens. I have been anticipating this view since I left home, and it has never failed to impress. At the end of this short road, and centered perfectly on it, is a Sugar Maple. In winter, its bare branches call attention to its flawless structure; in summer, its dense green foliage renders it perfectly opaque so that one can no longer see the sky beyond.
At this time of the year it is resplendent, its leaves a symphony of brilliant yellows and reds. I appear to have chosen the ideal time to come this way, and the tree shines as if clad in gold, reflecting, even somehow enhancing the sunlight that falls on it.
Sunbeams weave in and out of the layers of leaves, a shimmering dance that lights up the street while simultaneously lightening my heart. Twenty years driving down this road, and it has never failed to amaze me. I let out a gasp involuntarily.
Autumn is full of the spectacular: beauty that is so bold and glorious, that one can only gasp in awe. Our hikes in the woods take on a special meaning in this season. We are surrounded by beauty, the kind that is difficult to capture in a photograph, and yet I find myself taking picture after picture.
All around us are blueberry and huckleberry plants, a sea of dark reds and burgundy that covers the forest floor, and appears to stretch on forever. The poplars show off their pure lemon-yellow leaves, while the oaks present a range of tawny browns, ochres and deep reds, and sometimes shock you with a pure orange.
We especially like walking by streams and lakes, for the water magnifies all that color. Both the birches and Red Maples love the water’s edge, and the water burns as it reflects the dazzling rich crimson of the maples and the golds of the birches. Above us, the crisp blue fall sky is the perfect backdrop to the patterning of colors. And when the sun sets in fall, it lights up sky and earth with glowing embers of pink and yellow, releasing a heat that warms you from within.
The show continues till mid-November, ending with the bright yellow of the beech trees, among the last to turn color, a final round of applause against the now bare branches of the oaks and maples, and the green needles of the pine trees.
This beauty is extravagant and sensational, it dazzles, astonishes and demands that one use superlatives to describe it. It is a pageant of colors, a theatrical spectacle that nature puts out before it goes into its winter break. This is the beauty that movie stars are made of, and about which songs are written. Its very nature ensures it is seen, praised, and celebrated.
There is another kind of beauty that lives in these woods, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes hidden. You may even pass it by, unaware. Then someone points it out and you are transformed, unable to leave the woods without seeking it out each time you visit. I feel it while walking on the trail filled with crunchy fallen leaves that crackle with each step, and my feet suddenly sink into a soft carpet.
Below me is a bright green bed of moss poking its head through the brown oak leaves, perfectly soft and asking to be touched. I clear some of the leaves to take a closer look, and realize it is made of myriad little stars, enough in that little cushion, to fill a whole night sky. Such is also the beauty of fern leaves, which a good friend once shared with me. To look at one of the fronds, and see cut within it, leaf within leaf within leaf, a single frond containing an infinite fractal beauty. It is a beauty that invites me in and asks me to pause. It resides in the peeling bark of a birch tree, alternately smooth and crisp to the touch. It can be found in the delicate blossoms of the aster which dot the woods, their pale blue color an unexpected counterpoint to the flaming oranges and reds of everything around them.
This is a beauty with a quietness that can soothe, but can also unexpectedly excite. Its delicacy calls for close observation, and it subtly draws you into its world, and moves you quietly. It keeps you wondering about what other secrets these woods hold, what hidden worlds remain to be explored. You could miss it, walk right past it, and your world will be poorer for that.
There lurks in these woods, a third kind of beauty, of which I have only recently become aware. It is irreverent and bold, the kind that makes one wonder: is this beautiful in an ugly sort of way or ugly in a beautiful sort of way? It doesn’t ask to be observed, but doesn’t remain hidden either; it just is, uncaring of whether it meets any norms. It is a flippant, reckless beauty, bordering on grotesque. I see it within the mushrooms spread all over the woods.
There is one mushroom that glows bright purple, and has white spots; it invites me to speculate what kind of fairy creature once sheltered beneath it? Fallen on the ground is a birch tree, its white peeling trunk taken over by what look like so many butterfly wings, that I almost expect it to take flight on this windy day. Yet another mushroom blooms with so many garish petals, brilliant orange edged with white, as if mocking at once, the bright colors of both garden flowers and the forest trees.
Where the dazzling colors of the trees overwhelm me with a profusion of words, this kind of beauty keeps me searching, and my vocabulary feels painfully inadequate to capture its essence. In the end, all I can do is laugh out loud, as it fills me with its own irreverence.
We go to the woods, sometimes to just gaze in awe, sometimes to reflect and sometimes to laugh. The woods in fall offer us ample opportunity for all three. Somewhere in the woods, the water burns in gold, and the leaves glow orange and red. Those leaves fall down on a little carpet of moss which is made of infinite stars. In the shade of the trees with the glowing leaves and next to the starry carpet, is a bright purple mushroom spotted in white. The woods remind me that the flamboyant, the quiet, the defiant, they can all live together, and there is space in my life for all three.
