Another American Adventure: leaf update

Sunday, October 10, 2010

leaf update

This is how it looks at the Knob Hill Park today. Fall was a little further along in Wellsville and western New York State, but not much. Quite warm today as well - 70 deg F.

Sometimes it seems as if we've somehow slipped into an alternative universe up here. Fairy tale land.

2 comments:

BarbaraOctober 10, 2010 at 5:14 PM
I love your response to the leaves turning. Are people allowed to burn the leaves around CTWP? Here the leaves are gathered up and used for compost in the city parks, I believe.
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beth cioffolettiOctober 11, 2010 at 5:35 AM
I haven't noticed any fires or burning around, so I assume that it isn't allowed. There are some big trees that go from green straight to brown. With the first frost, I guess all the leaves will go down in one big drop. I just love seeing the leaves fall, though. Something so dramatic yet incredibly gentle about it.
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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.