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November 8, 2005
A week ago when I drive to in to work what stood out were the many reds. Today the drive was bathed in swaths and swirls of yellow and yellow-orange. What a difference a week makes!
Award for the brightest and deepest of the yellows has to go to the hickories of various kinds. It’s hard to identify them in detail driving at forty miles per hour by but you can tell hickories by their large compound leaves, and their colors this fall are intense – from a deep yellow to a deeper yellowish orange. This morning the bright morning sun shone a few hickories that were nothing less than brilliant. The harvest of hickory nuts is heavy this year, and many hickory limbs seem from a distance extra droopy from the weight.
Many tulip poplars, usually turning color earlier in the fall, have waited it seems to show off with the hickories this year, and are just now turning. Some of the brightest yellows belong to them. They stand out even from a distance by their very tall straight trunks – indeed they are usually the tallest tree in a stand of trees -- and are noteworthy for their large tulip shaped leaves. On days I don’t have to pay attention to the road ahead I love to watch the yellow leaves high in a tulip poplar break loose and fall, bouncing off limbs and other leaves as it makes its way down to the forest floor.
You can’t ever know what a maple tree will do as to fall color. The silver maples (known for the white or silvery color under the leaf) usually turn a light yellow, or may just sort of shrivel and fall. I saw many yellow silver maples today. But with the other maples it’s just a year to year surprise. I saw a large red maple with red leaves at the tips, and the body of the tree with yellow leaves. Sometimes the leaves change from yellow to orange to red as the chemical pigments change. We have sugar and black maples as well as red and silver in the area. Many wild maples are hybrids. Maples may offer red, orange, or yellow colors consecutively, or all at once. Seems this is the week for yellow.
I saw yellow leaved sycamores, yellow leaved red buds, yellow leaved willow oaks, and yellow leaved ashes on the drive in.
Do you ever have those moments when you’re in a car, when you come around a bend, and the sun is shining on a group of trees in full autumn color, and it just fills up your vision and for a moment you just want nothing more than to STOP life dead in its tracks and revel, or maybe have one of those Matrix super slow-mo moments, and just let that beauty feed your soul and soak into you like water into dry ground? Well, that’s how I felt today. But I couldn’t stop; there was a car behind me. So I drove away sad. I’m writing this as therapy, to try to make that moment last a little longer.
Back to reds. It seems that the Bradford pears are turning red this week, but since I don’t recognize Bradford pears as a legitimate member of that wonderful class of organisms called trees, I can’t count them really. Now I’m being grumpy, taking out my missed moment of soaking up the beautiful moment on that most pathetic of manmade trees.
Fall has been belated, and has come upon us all at once it seems. I hope I can get out and enjoy it today, and you to. Peace.
Joel Gillespie
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