Autumn, 2023

     It's actually not a very spectacular autumn this year.  The trees seem confused. Some are still vigorously green with only one branch trying on yellow. Many turned brown in a dried-up fashion before they started turning yellow or red, so now they look half-dead and half-autumnal. Still, in the high country, the colors are better. Here is a picture from a hike on the beautiful Cook and Green trail last week.

                                    photo by Margaret della Santina

    Southern Oregon's autumns can be absolutely stunning. Here is what I wrote in 2013 to accompany Barbara Kostal's painting, "Autumn: Equinox," in our book, Wisdom of the Heart. 

    

    This autumn, on a sun-warm day in the woods, my heart is yellow—not a sickly pale jaundice, but a hearty, bright upspringing of rich, aqueous yellow; not a cowardly jealousy but a bold, brilliant glory of cadmium-rich yellow given it by maples, oaks, alders, and hazelnut trees flaming with the lustrous colors of canaries, goldenrods, and honey. Like a match, the sun ignites a maple in a dark hillside of evergreens with yellow fire. Gathering this fire in the palms of their hands, the broadleaf maples fling it into the air. Circles of yellow spiral from the trees like whirling embers, flowing through the leaves like warm air in a house, falling from the saturated yellow of broadleaf maples and the softer lemon of alders and the fulvous amalgamation of colors in the starry-tipped leaves of viney maples.

    I cannot drink it in enough, this aureateness, the gildedness of trees in autumn. 

    If the autumn of 2023 isn't as brilliant as that one, it also isn't as drab at the autumn of 2011, about which I wrote, "What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us acrhomatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year? Brown, brown, brown—everywhere it's brown."

      Well, every year is different. Even in its diminished brilliance, autumn is a beautiful time of year, and I am loving my hikes in the mountains this fall.