Suddenly fall

Way back when we were making plans for the fall, we were able to book the place in the Adirondacks we last saw in May. It seemed a long time off, and even hitting the road for it yesterday it seemed much too early. Fall? Leaves? New York City's trees are drying out a bit, but it's felt like a protracted late summer. Once we crossed the Hudson and started driving up the Palisades, the reality of autumn started to hit. Honey locusts flushing yellow, vines reaching for magenta, and maples golden and orange and even red. The show continued through the Catskills, but further wonders awaited. The New York Foliage Report predicting the 'Dacks would be at peak but, while many trees are still flush with green, it feels like we might even be a little past peak, at least higher up.

If I wasn't ready for the leaves, I also wasn't ready for fall. Heading north in this season always fast-forwards the season in a jarring way, allowing a wanted or wanted sneak peak of what is to come, soon corrected when we head back, but this time I felt almost affronted. I wasn't ready for this! I didn't need (or deserve) a holiday yet - we're just six weeks into the semester. And the terrifying debacle of the election, surely it's not just a month away?! Eventually, though, the lyricism of the changing colors got to me. 

The spectacle of fall foliage continues to confound me with feelings I can't parse - though I'm getting there! It's odd, as I remarked last year, for humans to trek out to these forests only to see the end of something, as though this were the goal, not the byproduct of winding up. But I've had the chance to spend more time with deciduous forests this year than ever before (though the fate of the forest I saw dance into spring in North Carolina is unclear...), including up here. With a few exceptions, every leaf I was seeing will have been new to me, new since last year. 

 Didn't Simon and Garfunkel sing about this? 

Hello, hello, hello, hello

Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

That's all there is

And the leaves that are green turn to brown ...

 

But that's not quite what I'm feeling (though I wonder now about the residues left by hearing this song in my Southern California childhood!). I feel I know these trees a little better. Yes, these leaves are being released to their next mission, as have countless generations of leaves past. Their work is not done, or maybe their work but not their contribution. In a new piece, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of fallen cedars but what she says applies to everything in the forest: 

As inert as the logs seem, there is a ferment of activity inside, like dreams moving inside the head of a sleeper. … When the tree was alive, most all of the cells in the trunk of the tree were dead. They were just empty tubes designed to hold up the tree and to transport water. But now that the tree is dead, it is more alive than ever before.

The very soil beneath our feet is sublimed leaf litter. Since last fall I've got a deeper sense that the forest is a circle, nothing lost or squandered. We see only some of it, and value even less.