Autumn like spring is a season of transition. Once again New England will be brightly lit in color after a summer of soothing green. In spring everything is born. In autumn everything is dying.
You can hear the transition in the leaves. Their noise in the wind is different now. They’re less able to stand firm. There’s more flutter.
It’s begun to rain acorns.
At first while sitting alone in the family room late at night I wondered what the pinging sound coming from the deck was. I’ve got it figured out now.
During the summer you can walk to our mailbox in bare feet. Not now… now unless you want an acorn related injury.
Fall is pretty, but I know where this is heading.
Do things seem like they’re happening sooner this year, or am I delusional and in post-summer denial?
Claudia – It has been a very strange spring and summer and yes, there was a lot of tree-turning earlier too.
Mother Nature is definitely way off her feed.
Lou and Claudia – I hear this EVERY year without fail! Nothing’s unusual. However, leaves and acorns tell you about what has happened, not what will happen.
Even more painful than acorns were the hickory nuts that would fall in Huntsville, Alabama.
We lived on a heavily-wooded lot, and the hickory nuts would fall with a heck of a bang, the outer shell would split off, and the rock-hard inner nut would roll across the deck. Even the squirrels had trouble opening them, and preferred the acorns from the 100-year-old oak at the far end of the deck area. The next thing would be torrents of leaves off all the trees, burying the deck area for days. All that fall mess was followed closely by the ‘joys’ of winter–rain, snow and the occasional ice storm–a side effect of living boove 900 feet above sea level in that area.
Perhaps not as cold or as snowy as your location, but rough enough, when you added in the ice storms and the total inability of the city to clear any of the streets of snow, if any fell.
I live in Oakdale which tells you that we have an abundace of Oaks. My cat plays with the acorns and pushes them up and down the back sidewalk. Really cute to watch. But the leaves are also in abundance comes fall.