Another American Adventure: changing trees

Monday, August 30, 2010

changing trees

Already, since we moved into this apartment 2 1/2 weeks ago, the trees have started to change. Thinned. We couldn't see the road when we moved in, and now we can. So I'm thinking of taking a photo from the balcony view every Monday morning. This is the first one.

And though it is still summer, getting up into the 90s this week, I think, the nights and mornings are cool. The 50s and sometimes the 40s. That's winter weather in Florida. The natives up here love the extended warm days, calling it an Indian summer - though I would think that term would belong to October warm weather.

But things are dying. I can see it in the weeds. They are drying and crumbling, seeds dropping.

2 comments:

BarbaraAugust 30, 2010 at 10:38 AM
Good idea, beth. I am anxious to note the passing of one season into another.

Here certain trees turn before others. The ones in front of my place are the last to turn. The waning of daylight hours and the cooler evenings are a welcome, if melancholy change. People do use the term Indian summer too loosely. It is a period of warm weather after the first frost, e.g. in October.
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beth cioffolettiAugust 30, 2010 at 10:47 AM
The season change in Florida is not near so dramatic as here. There's something about being acutely aware of the "change", and watching it, feeling it, that is deeply stirring in me. It's as if you are seeing something, on a daily basis, that you don't know quite how to name, but it's undeniable. Heck, it's right in front of you!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.