Naked November

Last week, the leaves on the maple in the front yard were bright yellow, with splotches of wine-purple, cardinal red and pumpkin orange. By the weekend, the tree looked like it was on fire in the late afternoon sunlight. Gorgeous!
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Today, they've withered, most of them, and fallen in a blanket of dejection at the foot of the tree...and onto the sidewalk...and the steps to the porch...and onto Glenn's sidewalk and front lawn. Naked November fast approaches, flinging her leaves as she arrives.






Here, in the second photo, you can glimpse some of the maple's brilliance from last week in the leaves still clinging to the branches.

This is the melancholy part of Fall for me, the lingering demise of the leaves. Yet, this is also the time of year when I savor being alive the most. Maybe that's because the beauty is so fleeting. I have a friend, Kathy, who used to say she couldn't look at beautiful things for too long because she began to hurt inside. It was a good hurt, if that makes sense. It makes sense to me. For me, the pain (if that's what it is) of Naked November is due to knowing I can't hold onto the riotous, exciting, uplifting enthusiasm of all that color once the trees are bare. I take photographs of the leaves almost every year, but they don't do the real thing justice...probably because I can't capture how the light shines through the branches as it bounces off all those colors. I need to learn to take better pictures.

I don't know the name of this shrub that pops up in odd places in the back yard. It is one of the best reds in my fall landscape, though, changing from a fiery red to a cyclamen-rose color. Its leaves are among the last to fall to the ground every November.

That's a wayward rose-of-sharon cuddled in its branches. I like the color combination, the contrast.

At the side yard between my house and neighbor Glenn's, there lives the paw-paw tree/shrub I mentioned several posts ago and a viburnum (one of those whose name I couldn't recall in that post.)

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The viburnum's leaves turn a heart-aching deep red, reminding me of winesap apples, minus the white speckles. I put a few together in a sort of composed-salad arrangement, with the yellow paw-paw leaves.


If the changing seasons offer a life-lesson, it must be to savor each moment of beauty for the joy that it brings, for they are fleeting and sometimes far between.

Photo images above (c) Martha McLemore, November 2008

Raking Leaves, Part One

Great day to rake leaves; cool enough for a sweater, but not too cold. Bright, sunshiny day. Down the street, someone is mowing grass, maybe for the last time this season, though I doubt it. I usually have to cut grass well into November, sometimes as late as Thanksgiving week.





A couple of doors down in the other direction, a neighbor has fired up her fireplace for the first time this fall; smells like apple wood and oak burning.





I like to let the leaves stay on the ground as long as I can, to enjoy their fading colors and the smell of them as they dry in the sun. It's a balancing act, though, trying to guess how long is long enough without allowing the leaves to get moldy. Mold wreaks havoc with my asthma, the only drawback to the pleasure of raking.

So it goes.

[Shadow Crow photo (c)M.C. McLemore, OCT 2008]