As we barrel along the highway, the car rocks ever so gently in the not-so-gentle cross-wind. A scatter of sleet reduces visibility as the wipers gradually lose ground against even this unenthusiastic adversary, more smearing than clearing the windshield. Ahead, the sky is a blanket of gray. Behind? Blue gradually giving way to a blanket of gray.
Sigh. In and around our nation’s capital the lovely fall days are now done: We’re into . . . what? The dog days of autumn? I guess so. Biting winds. Precipitation that could turn into snow at any moment. Yup, it’s time to put the sandals away. And the camera.
This canvas of brown, gray, and brown-gray shades is not nature’s best look, says me. Bare trees, dried-up grasses, and matted mounds of last summer’s dog-strangling vine combine in a tangled, unattractive mess. I hate snow, but this landscape cries out for a cover of any sort, even a white one.
Surely not all transitions are as ugly as the passages into and out of a Canadian winter. These are, perhaps, the price we pay for spring. How lucky we are that we can both remember glorious days and look ahead to ones that will come again.
I like the line “This is the price we pay for spring.”
Tom
Tom – 🙂 It doesn’t feel like that all the time, but it does sometimes.
You have a marvelous eye for composition! You say you don’t like the scenery, but your photo belies this emotion.
Judith – 🙂 Many thanks. My view is that a good reflection redeems almost anything.
Although I can no longer tramp all over our farm property as I once did, I have the photos that my husband took when he continued to explore the seasons short of deep-snow winter. A stand of beige and white milkweed, pods opening their stores of seeds, is magical. Apple trees with a few clinging fruit tell me the deer have been fed well before winter sets in. Leaf-stripped trees reveal the beauty of their structures and the lacy shared art of their above-ground community that we now know is shared more intimately and intelligently beneath ground. Rocks and hills come into their own as the structure of a face or body can be studied for its grandeur. Without the clouds, there would be no sudden breakthroughs of the sunlight. I took a slice of one such December sky for my website banner and logo for its symbolism. Other favourites are views of the tall grasses, trees, fences, and a cabin sheathed in glass following an ice storm. If you did not put your camera away, might its take on late fall surprise you?
Laurna – Perhaps the difference between my drab view and your lovely vision is the difference between driving versus walking/tramping.
Isabel – every year at this time, someone takes their leftover Hallowe’en jack-o-lanterns out to the Greenbelt woods and leaves them for the deer, the squirrels and the chipmunks to munch on. Those bright orange pumpkins really stand out in the woods at this time of year.
John – 🙂 In the small numbers you’re talking about, that’s a great idea. We dropped our pumpkin at a house in Barrhaven that acted as a collection point for old pumpkins, headed for use as farm-animal feed.