Nosy neighbors

I wonder which of us is the nosier neighbor: Reggie, who insists on sniffing every last one of our neighbors’ leaves, or I, who snap incessant pictures of same?

 

Memento

This morning, among fallen horse-chestnut leaves, I found one perfect buckeye which I picked up and polished in my palm: a souvenir of the season.

It’s mild and partly cloudy today after yesterday’s unremitting gloom and last night’s rain: a perfect Saturday. It’s Columbus Day weekend, so half of Massachusetts will be driving up to New Hampshire to look at the leaves of others while half of New Hampshire drives up to Maine. As for J and I, we’ll stay close to home this weekend, realizing our own backyard is just as lovely as anyone else’s.

This morning I saw a single red maple leaf snagged in spider-silk, wildly dancing in a breeze that showered down its gold and crimson fellows. It was almost eerie to see one single maple leaf caught in suspension, as it autumn itself were held in abeyance.

Time stops for no one, and changing leaves and ripening berries are a vivid reminder of that simple fact. These days of gold and crimson are the ones we New Englanders live for, cherish, and hold in memory: bright days savored against bleak times. These are the days that get us through the cold, monochromatic days of December and January, when color is a distant memory.

This isn’t something a leaf-peeping tourist can appreciate, for the true beauty of a New England autumn doesn’t fully ripen until mid-winter, when both the leaves and their peepers are gone. In the dark days of mid-winter, only hope and the memory of bright gold and crimson breezes remain, curled like cotyledons in their seeds. The memory of these bright and brilliant days is what we New Englanders tuck inside our souls like folded snapshot, a cherished memento to cheer us when the nights are long and cold.

 

Fruitful

This morning I took a handful of pictures of the gathered acorns along a Newton curb and storm sewer: a river of acorns that has puddled from an ongoing torrent from overhead branches. This year’s bumper crop of New England acorns has been reported in the news and on the blogs, and it’s a phenomenon I’ve already Twittered twice. Whenever I drive into J’s driveway, I hear the snap-crackle-popping of crushed acorns under my tires, and whenever I walk Reggie around the block, we watch our step, careful not to roll and stumble over marble-like nuts underfoot.

This year’s over-abundance of acorns has everyone talking. The neighborhood mail carrier Reggie I see pushing her mail cart from door to door most mornings remarked about them today, predicting a bad winter given the number of nuts underfoot. I don’t know if trees “know” what the meteorological future holds, but their insentient guesses are probably as good as anyone’s.

I do know we had an abnormally rainy June here in New England, and I don’t know what sort of effect that has on the life cycle of oak trees. An abundance of autumnal acorns, in other words, might say more about this past summer’s weather than it does about the coming winter. Still, whatever the winter has in store, the squirrels and chipmunks will be well-fed, at least if their autumn hoarding has keep up with a healthy supply of rodent-food.

It’s also the season for the prickled seeds known as beggar’s ticks, which I can’t pull off quickly enough to keep Reggie seed-free. No sooner than I detach one clinging cluster of flat, microscopically hooked seeds than I find another and another…and by the time I’ve de-seeded the dog from one walk, it’s time to take another. There seems to be no end in the supply of beggar’s ticks, with each year offering another bumper crop. Whereas an over-abundance of acorns gets swept by autumn rains and homeowners’ garden hoses toward gutters and storm sewers, beggar’s ticks arrive inside suburban houses, smuggled in the nestling warmth of dog and cat fur.

It’s a lush and fruitful world out there, even as Nature is closing up shop for the season. Trees are tucking the last of their summer sugars into roots and fruits, and squirrels and dogs alike are helping to disperse plant seeds, wittingly or not. Fall is, after all, a time to cast off leaves and fruit in mind-boggling abundance–nature’s dumping time, the season when cast-offs get carried and squirreled away, stored against the coming season of want.

Click here for this morning’s handful of acorn images. Enjoy!

 

The lesson of leaves

The leaves are already starting to turn in both Newton and Keene, as if the first week of September comes and the chemistry of tree and herb alike immediately changes, switching into shut-down mode. It’s a change that’s been a long time coming, of course–in a sense, all any leaf does with its life is prepare to die, accomplishing as much photosynthesis as it can in the summer sun while somehow sensing in its insentient way that the end is mere months away.

What would you do with your life if you knew you had only three months to live? Leaves spend every ounce of their cellular selves working, toiling at the drudgery of converting air, light, and water into an energy that will outlive them, stored in miserly roots, stems, and fruit. Leaves don’t see this work as drudgery because they don’t see anything at all. Instead of laboring over complaints and resentments, leaves lead the simplest of lives, simply doing their job and then dying without complaint. Not an ounce of energy is wasted fighting or bewailing fate: when the time comes to change, wither, and then fall, leaves simply follow their situation.

Go outside some bright autumn day, or even on a gray moody one, and listen: can you hear it? Can you hear the sound of leaves bemoaning their lot, lamenting the brevity of their days and the pure tedium of their allotted job with all its mindless chemical transpiration? Do you hear the mournful wail of millions as countless leaves succumb to dessication and then die, their anonymous bodies fed as fuel to the fire? No, leaves don’t fight it; leaves don’t fight anything. They are expert in surrender. Leaves recognize the way the wind blows and fall into it, allowing themselves to be carried aloft without care.

 

A cue from Kousa

If only we all could take a cue from Kousa dogwood, which as its flowers fade from their perfect prime ripen into beautiful fruit. All ages have their own beauty, not just the young buds.

Click here for a handful of images of Kousa dogwood blossoms fading into fruit. The weekend promises to be sunny here in Massachusetts, so I plan to spend as much time as possible outside and unplugged. Happy weekend, everyone!

 

Growing on trees?

I’d love to know the story behind the large canine pinch collar someone has put around a tree in the vicinity of Cold Spring Park. Are Newton trees so rambunctious, they need prong-collar correction? Or did some dog, on his way to Cold Spring’s newly debuted off-leash area, throw off the choke of oppression before he got there?

Whatever the explanation, this much I’m guessing: this tree’s bark is probably worse than its bite.

 

Autumn austerity

With all my recent talk of gloves and wind-chills, you’d think winter had definitively arrived in New England, but that’s not entirely true. The leaf bags and barrels lining Newton streets tell the story better than I can: still, even in the chill, there’s a whole lot of raking, blowing, bagging, and barrel-filling going on.

But the time for leaf collection won’t last for long. Compared to this time last year, when the trees were still brilliant, most of this year’s leaves have already fallen. There are still some hold-out oaks clinging to copper like misers clutching coins, but November winds have scoured most branches bare. These days, the only reliable green you’ll see overhead comes from evergreens or ivy. Summer’s fecundity has given way at last to autumn austerity, the abundant fertility of yesterday’s leaves being gathered as tomorrow’s trash.

 

Enigma

At first glance, they look like an alien life form: little pink globules hanging from gracefully branching ornamental trees. And this year, they’re everywhere: golf-ball-dimpled fruit dotting a tree in front of the President’s house at Keene State, and baubles bobbing on a tree by a bench in front of the now-closed Waban branch library in Newton.

I don’t remember seeing pink, dimpled globules hanging from trees last year, but surely they were there: the trees that currently sport spherical pink Easter eggs aren’t new to their neighborhoods, and neither am I. But I had to do a double-, triple-, then quadruple-take when I first noticed this year’s strange fruit. These alien life forms hang from trees with dogwood-looking leaves, and dogwoods are popular ornamentals in both Newton and Keene. But the dogwoods I’m familiar with–the wild kind–bear clusters of bright red berries, not funky, fleshy globes.

A quick Google search solves the mystery: Kousa dogwood, alternately called Asian or Japanese flowering dogwood. Apparently ornamental Asian dogwoods don’t follow the same fruiting form as their wild American counterparts. But still, I’m left with another, more pressing enigma: how could I have walked for so long through the neighborhoods I and these dogwoods share without having previously noticed them?

 

Dreaming of trees

I’d love to think at least one of the giant bronze baby heads planted outside the Huntington Street entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is dreaming of trees. Titled “Day and Night,” the installation was sculpted by Spanish realist Antonio López García and consists of a pair of bookended baby heads: one awake, the other sleeping. Today, both heads were showered with windblown crabapple blossoms.

If you, too, wish to dream of trees, click over to 10,000 Birds for this month’s installment of the Festival of the Trees. There you’ll find enough tree-related links to keep your eyes wide open.

Click here for my photo set featuring Antonio López García’s big babies. You can see their conception here and installation here. Enjoy!

 

Growing on trees

Yesterday, it was the shoe-fruits of London. Today, it’s the coat hangers of Keene. What do you think will start growing on trees tomorrow?