Another American Adventure: a late autumn?

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

a late autumn?

I don't know, but the autumn seems delayed this year. I was talking to the girl at Starbucks today, and she agrees with me - there's something strange in the air. The leaves look tired, covered with age spots and ready to go, possibly skipping the last big burst of color that they had last year. It is still fairly warm today (the 70s), but supposed to cool down dramatically in the next couple of days. We'll see.

2 comments:

BarbaraSeptember 28, 2011 at 7:06 PM
This is kind of late. The leaves are turning here, but they have a way to go. By now, the trees are aglow and the sidewalks are covered with fallen leaves.

Those "age spots" is a fungus, I believe, that is not fatal to the trees. It used to be rampant among the Norway maples, but doesn't seem to be so bad this year. Fingers crossed.
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beth cioffolettiSeptember 29, 2011 at 3:52 PM
THere's a lot of the fungus in the woods, but not so much in the neighborhood around our apartments. This weekend it is getting a bit cooler, which I'm looking forward to!
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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.