This tree is on the path I walk when I go to swim at lunch. These photos were taken over the course of a week. Yesterday there were no leaves left, and I wanted, bleakly, to take a picture but had forgotten my camera. It's just as well. The trees are becoming skeletons now. Even the pine trees are dropping needles everywhere. It's a myth that they are implacable. They shed, too, just not quite as visibly as their deciduous cousins.
This is a hard time of year for me. Oh, yes, the leaves are great and the sky is such a piercing blue and the sun is all slanty low and yellow. It smells great, all these smoky leafy smells, with the tang of cold weather pinching the inside of your nostrils, too. And on rainy dark nights there's something extra spooky about the windows rattling, and leaves blowing all around everywhere. It's like your own horror picture, all the prickly props there for your imagination.
But oh, it's dark so early. And everyone who knows me will be rolling their eyes, because this becomes my mantra. Can you BELIEVE how DARK it is? How EARLY? I mean, it is SO DARK. ALREADY. And then I get all overdramatic. We still have more than a month. The days are getting even shorter. Pretty soon it's going to be dark all the time. Dark when we wake up. Dark when we leave the office. Dark for the whole drive home. Dark dark dark dark dark. I don't mind the cold so much as the dark, and I don't think I mind the dark so much as the GETTING DARK, the days slipping into night at this crazy restless pace. One day the tree is full of leaves and the next day its a grey skeleton. One day I can walk the dogs around the block after work, admiring the glowing sunset and how it illuminates the windows on the island houses across the bay. And the next day I get home from work and it's already dark out, and I want to hibernate and eat dinner at 6 and get into bed at 7:15.
I'll get through this, I suppose, when December comes and it's all lovely and see-your-breath frosty and there's snow on the ground and I can get all rhapsodic about cross country skiing and the beautiful frost patterns on the windowpanes. But late October and November are very tough. Go ahead and start with the gloating. This is your time to shine.