Seasonal changes depict stages of life

In all my autumns on this little planet, I don’t remember one as pretty as this.

It began for us in early October when we drove through western North Carolina and Virginia, noting that the color had just begun in the higher reaches. When we returned home, this time through part of Tennessee, the sourwoods and dogwood proclaimed their importance in shades of burgundy.

Here at home there are trees turning colors we had never noticed before. Twenty-two years we’ve lived in this house. Wouldn’t you think that’s long enough to remember the walnut tree’s leaves are going to turn deep yellow, and the oaks’ will be the color of leather?

Halfway up our street is a tall young maple, or maybe something else; I’d have to walk into the yard to see. This is the first year I’ve noticed it, and all because of the position of the sun. I happened to walk around the subdivision about noon one day last week. The sun was full on the leaves of that tree, and I could hardly bear the beauty of it. It virtually shimmered.

Then there’s the very tall scraggly oak in front of our house that turns crimson late in autumn. This one I think I do remember from year to year, but my daily inspection fails to confirm exactly which tree it is. There are several out there taking their sweet time about coloring up, and right now I’m doubting my own recollection.

Every fall since they extended Peachtree Parkway to Redwine Road I find some excuse to ride down that way to see the sugar maples at the entrances to subdivisions. They are nothing less than magic in their apricot-to-rosy garb, especially as the afternoon sun finds them.

Other years some event – a bad storm or unusual heat – takes the leaves off the trees early, or disrupts the progression of color. This year, however, the change has been slow and steady. A few variables like fog and light rain merely add to the luster of the day.

Just now I’m sitting in our glass-walled great room, watching a cardinal in holiday red pick over the black sunflower seed in a slowly rotating feeder. The yellow hickory leaves and the green of the butterfly bush give him, even at twilight, a pleasant backing.

You’d think I’d know my own trees. I told our daughter Jean that the other day and she said she can tell hers apart. Easy for her: She has only two, a dogwood in front and a Bradford pear in back.

Sure is hard to believe what botanists tell us, that the leaves are not “turning” color but have always been gold and garnet hidden by the chlorophyll that made them all look green. What an amazing system. What an expenditure of energy just to clutter our deck with crunchy brown leaves.

In past years I’ve had bouts of depression in the autumn. My birthday is very late in the year, the days are shorter and the nights colder, and it seems as though everything conspires to remind me of my own mortality. Fall represents the decline of health and energy, approaching the end of life as we know it.

Not so this year. This year the entire pageant has lifted my heart. This year spring is infancy and childhood, summer is productivity, fall is discovery that I’ve had my chance and in some ways have failed, in others, succeeded beyond all expectations.

Then comes winter, ah, winter, the companion of old age with its challenges: loss of strength, unwelcome pains and tremor, feeling a little bit sorry for myself. But winter is every bit as beautiful as fall. The curtain of leaves between our house and the rest of the world has been drawn back, little by little, and we appreciate the architecture of the trees.

Now, occasionally, we see deer passing through our woods. They probably did so in summer and fall, but the leaves work two ways: What gave us privacy protected them too.