These woods are so alive right now with color that the words to adequately describe it escape me. So vibrant, so insistent, and not to be overlooked or outdone, autumn never disappoints. There is every imaginable shade of yellow, crimson, and brown, and I realize that I am grateful to the pines and hemlocks for extending a cooling green touch toward the blaze that is the fall landscape.
How easily could all this color, thrown together on an artist’s canvas, become a muddy mix? But here in these woods, each small stroke of nature’s brush seems to fit in perfectly as though it had been intended, as though some unseen hand had decided just where to put it and where it would most perfectly complement the scene. It is literally layer upon layer of color, and practically speaking, it shouldn’t work at all. All these colors should clash, like mismatched socks or the wrong color tie. But they don’t. No two seasons produce exactly the same scenario each year, but each year, nature manages to pull it off to everyone’s wonder and awe.
At this time of year, the human eye cannot take in enough at any one time. I find myself staring up into the trees until my neck aches. But each time I turn to go, it pulls me back in, and once again, I turn to gaze in breathless admiration, trying to look at it all at once, fill my mind with it, imprint it permanently in my memory. It would be so easy to drown in this opulence, to lose myself in this riot of color. For here, the woods rise in autumn like a rich golden-red sea, its waves coming at me from all sides and never subsiding until the last leaf has spent itself on the forest floor.
I remember my early days here, how I busied myself unpacking boxes of knick-knacks and trinkets. It was mid-September, and the trees had only begun their annual shift. It wasn’t until several weeks into it, when a single maple branch hanging over my back porch seemed to turn crimson overnight, that I realized there would be no need to decorate. My windows would more than provide me with ornamentation, and nothing I could arrange inside would ever take my eye for very long from what they had to show me. I hung only the barest of curtains and didn’t bother at all with window shades, as I wanted to allow as much of the beauty in as possible.
Each window essentially became a painting that changes each time the wind blows. Each day, the scene changes by tiny degrees, as the leaves burst into life in the spring, drip summer rain and then flutter to the ground in the fall. The weaker trees fall in the gale, out of deference to those taller and stronger, creating lateral contrast against the vertical orderliness. What work of art could I possibly affix to my wall or prop on a table that could exceed this perfection that needed no preliminary sketches to achieve? As time goes by, I find myself boxing up more and more of those dust-gatherers that only pull my eye away from the spectacle. And I find myself spending more and more time looking out a window, still incredulous that I managed to find my way to this high place, affording me a view not unlike a bird’s from its nest.
There will be more wonders to come as yet another year ends. That’s the eternal beauty of it, that this color will fade into memory, replaced with the brush strokes of another season, as I turn yet another page in my album of woodland images.
— Rachel Lovejoy is a freelance writer living in Lyman. She can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.
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