END OF AUTUMN

The poignant end of autumn's beauty lingers in the roadside palette. 

Rain soaked leaves vibrate with their remaining colour,  

dribbling and dropping splashes from an artist's palette, 

until there is a 'Jackson Pollack' style painting on the road's dark canvas. 

Brown, the quintessential colour of age and decay dominates now.  

Leaves, once colourful, have shrivelled and fluttered in despair to the ground. They lie sadly in puddles or ruffled to the side of the road where, with other aged leaves,  they rim the road with a strip of multi-hued brown.

Red, the colour associated with this season, no longer brightens the trees. Faded red leaves can be found on the road verge, adding a dull tone to the predominant browns. 

Occasionally a bright sparkle catches our eye, and leads to a smile on our lips as we remember the array of colours on the trees just days earlier.

Yellow  lingers the longest.  It creates a visual display of tints and shades  ranging from the saturated chrome yellow to the palest straw yellow. Yellow reminds us of the warm sun of summer that during autumn fades gently into the bright chill of winter.

This year we have enjoyed a determinedly pedestrian autumn. 

 It is November, and  the weather remains pleasant,   Swatches of colour remain on some trees and bushes,  and speckles the road. 

A long autumn, like this, is a joy and a blessing. It's a time to be thankful for our warmer seasons, and gives us time to prepare for our cold season.  In the midst of it, we can enjoy a multi-hued landscape.

AUTUMN COLOURS

  

Autumn, a time of transition from the growth of summer to the hibernation of winter. 

In autumn, the landscape is transformed into a blaze of colour, 

a celebration of what was glorious growth, commemorated by fireworks exploding on the hills, 

in the ditches,and across the fields of Atlantic Canada. It is a celebration of the last vestiges of growth, the varigated colours indicate the variety of trees in the landscape. 

The palette can be breathtaking.

This year the autumn colours have been vivid with red and orange.

Every year the autumn colour combination is different, unique to that year. 

Some years tints and shades of yellow dominate the scenery,   sometimes there is plenty of ochre,   and umber 

and some years there is a riot of red and crimson.  

The reds shades are quintessentially Canadian, the official colour of our nation. 

During an autumn such as this one, it is easy to understand why that colour was chosen as our colour of nationhood – the liveliness of the colour on the hills is just the vibrancy that our fathers of confederation would have been looking for in the citizens of this country.

That sense of colour certainly exhibits itself during the autumn, not just on the hills and dales, but in the chest-swelling appreciation of the beauty of this season. 

Canadians, for the most part, love autumn.   

We love the colour and the vibrancy. 

We love the last tango with warm weather. 

We love the crisp evenings that we know, scientifically, are necessary to create the colourful palette we see around us. 

We love the full glory of the apple harvest,   when rows of green trees have globes of red hanging from their branches, red in various permutations, from solid red to speckled gold or green apples. The sweetness of the apples sustains us during the winter, reminding us of the pending spring and summer, of the cycle of the seasons, and giving us hope for another fruitful autumn, months hence.

Autumn, a time of change and transition, a time of remembrance and hope, a time of preparation for the chill and cold of the frozen months ahead, a time to feast and enjoy the repasts of our recently harvested crops while putting some aside to feed ourselves for winter. It is a season to remind us to plan, for now, for the near future and for the future years. Caring for an apple tree today will yield fruit for years ahead, preparing and clearing the garden today will ensure that the soil is productive for another year.  Sitting on the porch, with the cool wind breathing down our necks startles us into realising the the precedence of winter winds, and nostalgically remembering the warmth of the summer breeze, which has recently wafted elsewhere.

For now, the transition is gentle and welcome with its array of primary colours and the celebration of the tasty products of the warm summer. Let us revel in the colours of autumn, which are our last sweet snippets of the softness of summer.