The Advent of Winter

The three sisters reflecting the red sunset.


After a most unusual summer of cool temperatures and rain, the prairie was spectacular with rich color this month. There were trees covering the green and growing grass beneath with blazing yellow leaves, generously spilling color. I should have spent time photographing the glowing orange and yellow and red of the tall grass. I did not. Now the color, and the chance, has been lost. It remains only in my memory, and that too will fade and become nothing.

The fall of leaves is as magic as their arrival, a silent ebb and flow, a living time signature through the melody of each year's turning, and to me, more beloved each season. It is not a sad passing, but the signal to look toward the coming change.

I was thinking how our lives are like leaves. We arrive and fall away individually, yet taken together, we adorn the trees in our season before falling back into the earth. Leaves continually return, never exactly the same, in new time. Above the fallen leaves, the limbs hold the machinery and spirit for new leaves. When the limb falls, others bring forth the leaves. When the tree is gone, when all the trees are gone, there are seeds of new trees, and the idea of new trees, all with long summers of leaves.