Another American Adventure: Autumn Leaf Update 2011

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Autumn Leaf Update 2011

Looking at the Autumn Leaf Update from last year (Sept. 20, 2010), it seems that autumn was just a little further along at this time. But we're getting there. Everything still looks mostly green, but the green is fading toward golden yellows - the tapestry colors. But you still have to look for it.

Lots of fungus like things around.

We went over to the North Park for a bike ride this afternoon. Pretty green over there.

But the boathouse and concession stands were closed. Which made it a little less crowded than when we were there last. Going around the lake is a good bike ride for me. Maybe if I do it often enough, I'll get faster - I only passed one other bicycler, an elderly man. Everyone else whizzed past me.

Waiting for John (who went up a hill on his mountain bike), I found a lovely little bench off in a secluded cove.

Good place for afternoon meditation.

1 comment:

BarbaraSeptember 24, 2011 at 3:18 PM
I see patches of red and yellow and brown in the tree cover. I find it interesting that different streets turn at different times. I suspect it has something to do with underground water.

It is later than last year. Must be due to all the rain.
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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.