When I was younger I never understood why anyone would drive any distance to look at a bunch of autumn leaves. Maybe because I grew up in Colorado: there were plenty of wonderful maples in town, but as soon as you got out of town just cottonwoods, or in the mountains just evergreens and aspen. The aspen are lovely, and people do drive up to see them, more today than they used to, but the effect is still monochromatic: either pale green against darker green, or that spiritual pale gold against the same darker green. Black and white with a yellow filter, or Tsvetaeva's "Here is light that tramples color."

(No wonder some of Ansel Adams's best black and white tree portraits are of dogwoods or aspens: those trees are all about posture and tissues that catch tiny portions of light, graceful as a waiter with a tray overhead or a dancer cupping hands to catch the rain. It works just as well, it works even better, when it's simplified to black and white.)

But then I went to Amherst to give a lecture in the middle of October, the leaves were turning, and people said it wasn't even a great year. My friend was driving, so I could just let my eyes swin open as the colors poured into me. It was like moving through a cathedral or living inside a jeweled crown. The various greens of spring and summer are pagan in their richness, sunk in the blind cycle of yearly renewal, guzzling rain and air to feed flowers and fruit and (eventually) enrich the soil. Leaves that change color introduce a latter stage of religion, maybe Christian or Buddhist: death casts the beam of its meaning back over your whole life, all its doubts and beauties, putting them all in Relief. Everything that was the same looks different.

So leaf-peeping seems to be good for the soul, it wakes the eyes as drinkers of meaning. And still better, walk or drive through the places where you go anyway: the stunted, pagan green tree in the mall parking lot that you passed blindly every Saturday of the summer suddenly blazes up at you in bright holy lobster red, warning that you have been missing something essential and perfectly obvious.

Like the plum blossoms: they say: look! You are going to die!

Look! You are going to live forever.

Copyright 2001 Sibelan Forrester.

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