In color
Memories of my trip are tabbed in color:
Flying into North Carolina I was instantly mesmerized by the variegated forest I watched...almost like it was a movie...from the plane's window. North Carolina isn't a place "with lots of trees" to me ~ it is a forest, a strong community of trees that grudgingly gives bits of land to people for houses and businesses. When you see, for example, the L.A. basin, all you see is building: houses, stores, high-rises. Not in NC. You see trees ~ swaths of them, clumps of them, rivers of them, trees lining streets, trees en-sieging (1) houses. On this trip it was not GREEN, GREEN, GREEN, that filled my view, but rust and red and orange and yellow and brown. I caught my breath letting my eyes absorb the memory.
My kids told me, sheepishly, that I should have been there the week before. It was a differnt landscape for now, they said, all the leaves were nearly gone. I am not sorry for my timing. I can't know what I missed, but I loved what I saw. Yes, many of the trees were defrocked, scantily clad, like show-girls who had stripped off the outer layers of an exuberant costume. The beauty was there even so.
My friends' yard is backed by a wood. We don't have those where I live. We have trees, in yards, on golf courses, lining streets, a few in mall parking lots ~ but a wood, trees of this and that kind, not 'landscaped', but standing in clumps and clusters like friends at a party in a too small apartment ~ no, we don't have any of those. The whole back of their house is windows. It creates a marvelous panorama. I stood and watched it rain leaves. The predominant color was rust: rust orange, rust red, a rusty brown. The sky had intervals of blue, but most of the time it was a dusky grey. It really was like watching a painting unfold, the view was never the same from morning to noon to evening. I find myself searching for adjectives to discribe it all, and in the same thought-breath hesitating. Too many words will mar. It was somehow the very starkness that caught me. Empty branches, branches with a mere scattering of leaves clinging.
It is true that the week before I came the trees were all dressed up in their Autumn fair, but the week I was there was not the less in beauty for the change. I felt like I was on the hem of Autumn, the last edge before winter. Fittingly on my last night there was a surprize snow. I drove to the airport in the early, early morning with the ground and trees and roofs glazed in white. Again and again that week I found myself looking -- I don't think that is the right word: "looking" I need a word that shows that I was captured in the view, pulled in. It reinforces my belief in "faerie".
(1) the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.
Flying into North Carolina I was instantly mesmerized by the variegated forest I watched...almost like it was a movie...from the plane's window. North Carolina isn't a place "with lots of trees" to me ~ it is a forest, a strong community of trees that grudgingly gives bits of land to people for houses and businesses. When you see, for example, the L.A. basin, all you see is building: houses, stores, high-rises. Not in NC. You see trees ~ swaths of them, clumps of them, rivers of them, trees lining streets, trees en-sieging (1) houses. On this trip it was not GREEN, GREEN, GREEN, that filled my view, but rust and red and orange and yellow and brown. I caught my breath letting my eyes absorb the memory.
My kids told me, sheepishly, that I should have been there the week before. It was a differnt landscape for now, they said, all the leaves were nearly gone. I am not sorry for my timing. I can't know what I missed, but I loved what I saw. Yes, many of the trees were defrocked, scantily clad, like show-girls who had stripped off the outer layers of an exuberant costume. The beauty was there even so.
My friends' yard is backed by a wood. We don't have those where I live. We have trees, in yards, on golf courses, lining streets, a few in mall parking lots ~ but a wood, trees of this and that kind, not 'landscaped', but standing in clumps and clusters like friends at a party in a too small apartment ~ no, we don't have any of those. The whole back of their house is windows. It creates a marvelous panorama. I stood and watched it rain leaves. The predominant color was rust: rust orange, rust red, a rusty brown. The sky had intervals of blue, but most of the time it was a dusky grey. It really was like watching a painting unfold, the view was never the same from morning to noon to evening. I find myself searching for adjectives to discribe it all, and in the same thought-breath hesitating. Too many words will mar. It was somehow the very starkness that caught me. Empty branches, branches with a mere scattering of leaves clinging.
It is true that the week before I came the trees were all dressed up in their Autumn fair, but the week I was there was not the less in beauty for the change. I felt like I was on the hem of Autumn, the last edge before winter. Fittingly on my last night there was a surprize snow. I drove to the airport in the early, early morning with the ground and trees and roofs glazed in white. Again and again that week I found myself looking -- I don't think that is the right word: "looking" I need a word that shows that I was captured in the view, pulled in. It reinforces my belief in "faerie".
(1) the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.
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