2010-The brightest yellow was the star magnolia which slowly shaded from acid yellow green to pure golden yellow so bright it hurt your eyes. Then it gradually darkened to real gold and then mustard and then ochre. Today it is so butterscotch brown it makes my mouth water.
The trees on the hills all around have lost their brightness and turned a hundred shades of browns. It always amazes me how that one palette can seem as varied as the full spectrum when spread out before our eyes. Brown red and brown yellow now seem as separate and distinct as their primary cousins.
Yesterday, taking advantage of the warm to put away the grill and hammock and summer furniture, I came across a lone dandelion in the grass. We don’t think of later fall as a time for flowers to bloom but, like the errant dandelion, some do. The most spectacular and surprising is the forsythia which has more flowers now than in some poor springs and against dark burgundy leaves. My pink climbing rose didn’t re-bloom this year but many around here have. (I remember the roses in the churchyard in Aberdeen blooming into December. So poignant and utterly different from their June counterparts.)
Dandelion blooms
Yellow against frost-sere grass.
They do not fool me.
2011-An unprecedented nor’easter appears out of nowhere, roars up the coast and deposits about ten to twelve inches of snow. The leaves having not completely fallen, wet snow sticks to them and many branches come down; again leading to power outages (over a million all up the coast.) This is more than inconvenient this time as with temperatures dropping into the twenties, water lines freezing is a real possibility. We are lucky and power is on in less than twenty four hours though they say Connecticut and the Berkshires will take much longer. Bright green grass appears between the white patches, oddly littered with brown and yellow leaves. The grill and the lawn furniture are under a layer of snow-I’d thought I had more time. The dahlia is completely frost-blackened; time to bring the tubers inside.
I did buy seeds for the bird feeders, but though the bag was labeled black oil sunflower, it contained regular large sunflower seeds. They are mostly too big to fit through the little openings in my squirrel proof feeders and the birds must think I am playing a mean Halloween trick on them. They are not amused.
2012-Sunday night into late Monday night, a fair amount of wind and intermittent spits of rain. The power goes out, but that’s fairly common here. A tree is down across our road, but generally the roads are clear. Schools close for a day, the power returns. Without media input, that would have been our total experience of this particular late October storm.
But this storm was Super-storm Sandy. Gathered at houses with generators, over the airwaves of battery radios, and later when power returns, we hear and see an unending stream of images and reporting of the most devastating storm to ever hit the Northeast. We share each other‘s experiences now; ours is shaped and colored by what we consume through our devices. What we have invented has turned around to re-invent us and nothing is the same.
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