6:33 a.m. 64 degrees, wind S 4 mph, feels like summer looks like autumn, a schizophrenic morning. Sky: as confused as I am, mounds of black and blue across the west suggest umbrella; air and emerging sun suggest Coppertone; at home, my windows and doors wide open; my house freshening. Permanent streams: upper, puddles, sheathed in fallen leaves, mostly yellow; lower, leaves, also mostly yellow, speckle the bones of flow. Wetlands: woods along the western shoreline, an artist's palette of color, sunlit against a backdrop of bruised clouds. Marsh tan and brittle, with a mid-marsh thread of green reeds, around which water in the main channel struggles toward the river. Pond: a leaf flotilla; catbird, sounding like a spoiled child, mopes in the underbrush; house wren, in a tangle of grape, fires-off like a Smith-Corona, the sound of rapid manual typing, something I never mastered.
Flicker and pileated trade laughs. Hairy woodpecker quieting taps a basswood limb; then pauses to call, a sharp, unmusical peek. Chickadees, jays, crows, an almost inaudible creeper, and red-breasted nuthatches, less tooting than I expect.
Many years ago, when I was a little boy, I asked my Nana, who was born in Brooklyn, in 1890, how far back her memory went. Nana recalled the sound of walking through brittle leaves, holding both her parents' hands, shuffling her feet. I think of her memory, long ago incorporated, as I walk down the road, through a tunnel of Color, shuffling my own feet in the bands and pools of fallen leaves. The dogs don't share my enthusiasm (except for running and eating); stick to the edge of the woods.
Big-toothed and quaking aspens (popples) and red oaks, conspicuously green, wait their turn, while other hardwoods riot.
Although I'm well past my baseball-playing days, I sharpen my outfield skill tracking leaves that flutter down, red and yellow, unpredictably drifting like flyballs at Candlestick Park.
Gray squirrels en route to the front yard feeder, just off the road and ready to cross, scold me. The harvest over, red squirrels store their larder, digging, chattering.
Color: an opulent byproduct of water conservation. Birds are a backdrop to the kaleidoscopic landscape, a pageant of red and orange and yellow and purple that change by the day, by the hour, if the sun shines. Although I'd be hardpressed to tease a male Blackburnian warbler or a male American redstart out of the flushed congestion of maple leaves, black-throated blue warblers and female redstarts, drab gray sprites, stand out. A migration fallout, more sprinkle than a downpour, hunt through the driveway maples.
I imagine warblers in my house flying in and out of rooms filled with trees with orange leaves. Like the book Salamander Room, which I read to my boys (over and over), except my daydream doesn't include streams, marshes, puddles, and cascades that dribble down walls . . . I'm too old to be sliding across floors. I just want my house full of birds the color of summer and leaves the color of autumn. Is that too much to ask for?
Behind the barn door, nothing. A southbound dragonfly over the pasture. A good day to leave. A perfect day to walk.