by Mary Padilla
Everything appears under a canopy of leaves again, just as it did during the first four years of my life, when I lived at my grandmother’s house. It was a Victorian gingerbread affair on a wooded plot, which was more of an overgrown planting than a forest. I seldom left it in that early period, and now that I live in a geodesic dome, which we built in the middle of the woods, I seldom leave this place either.
This time of the year I spend most days outdoors in an Adirondack chair built by my grandfather, which now stands on a cliff in the backyard overlooking a pond. This is where I do most of my work, and all I see around me is trees, though there is an adjacent meadow filled with ferns that I can glimpse through breaks in the foliage on my way to and from the house. The setting resembles The Green Tube through which the Appalachian Trail passes in the mountains of Vermont without ever going above the tree line, in contrast to what happens in New Hampshire, where the trail winds on from one mountain top to the next.
So my perception of the world is literally colored by the leaves. This time of year the light that filters through them is still a brilliant green—actually many different greens responding to the play of light and shadow—set against the greys of the trunks and branches below, with their contrastingly textured bark. At this point there is just the occasional vibrant highlight, where the leaves on a particular branch have been the first to turn yellow or orange. But in general, I am still embedded in green, as if a cosmic gel filter had been inserted over the ambient lighting to impart a verdant quality to the scene.
Six weeks from now there will be a rapid change to a golden sheen overlaying the woods. Last summer, when we were visited by Canadian wildfire particulate, its refraction altered the light to yellow-orange, but this sudden harsh shift in the spectrum resulted in an ominously inappropriate hue. In what now passes for ordinary circumstances, we can anticipate a honeyed quality overtaking the darker greens, which had arisen in their turn from a deepening of the rapid light green burst of spring.
The cover from the tiny early leaves that were just unfurling then had been sparse enough to allow the ephemerals to cover the ground. These were evanescent wildflowers, a new species of which seemed to appear every day. They flourished only until the canopy overhead became dense enough to usurp their sunlight.
But now we’re about to lose all the green as it changes to yellows and browns, with some interspersed orange bits. The brilliant reds of the swamp maples and sumacs are largely a thing of the past around here, as we no longer experience nightly cold snaps sufficiently low to trigger that transformation. For a week or two I will live in this changed world, enveloped in that dramatically altered golden glow. Then, just as the intensity of sunlight is waning with the approach of the solistice, there will be a compensatory increase in its penetration. I will see—and hear—the leaves fall, as the trees strip down to their skeletons.
They will stand then revealed as individuals, without the cloaking of interlocking greenery linking one to the next. Their latticed structure will be more evident, as will the boulders and the fallen trunks that litter the forest floor like scattered pickup sticks. And when the winter comes, I will be able to see between the denuded branches to glimpse the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the surface of the pond in the parts where it is free of ice.
There will be less cover for wildlife then, and the animals will be more visible even before there is any snow cover to enhance the contrast. I will have a better chance of seeing deer stealthily approaching the pond to drink and to locate the owl I can hear hooting. Of course, there are already those who are less circumspect about making their presence known, the raccoons and possums that come trick-or-treating to the front door at night and the squirrels that openly clamber over the trees like jungle gyms and rustle the dried leaves on the ground as they run through them. The local song birds regularly approach the bird feeder without apparent caution.
And now so does this summer’s latest addition, a black bear that also makes periodic visits to their feeder in broad daylight, too brazen, at 250-300 pounds, to worry about being seen. I wonder, given global warming, if he will be taking the winter off to hibernate or if he will just keep going. It is up to us to look out for running into him, and the prospect does put a fine point on one’s general alertness. But in the end, paying attention is what it is all about, and he merely serves as a reminder that we need to fit into the world around us, because it is not just a backdrop to our existence. We need to step back, be still, and just experience the cyclical changes in the midst of which we live.
Mary Padilla: I write to see what I think.