The leaves along the creek have turned a bright lemon yellow and the breeze shakes them from the trees like falling snow. I sometimes forget how much I love the fall. Perhaps because I grew up in a largely coniferous forest the thrill of autumn colours was not ingrained in me like my love of the sweetly warm and fragrant summers of the west coast, and the rare and precious snowfalls that sparkled for a few days, sometimes just hours. Sacred seasons of warm green and diamond white, with flowers and a little orange dabbed here and there on the rainy shoulders of the year, subtler to me somehow. Not until Denmark did I experience the thrill of a deciduous forest lighting up in colours so bright against the dark blue of a fall sky, your breath catches. I was not accustomed to such glory. To be shocked by such beauty left me slightly dazed, and does even now when I think of it. But I still never expect fall splendour and so when it comes I am dazzled beyond words and I go around with my mouth open and cliches upon my lips and my camera poised to try to capture a golden, burning, rusty riot of colour upon the arms of the gentlest living beings, until they softly shed their glorious cloaks and stand naked for months as frost covers their refuse thick up in the ground. Oh the beauty of trees! And the sigh of the wind through their branches. But fall is also the creek winding through the soft carpeted forest floor, and the sun still warm where it shines, and the cool shadow, and the song of the birds, and the brilliance of the stars as the nights grow colder. I love it. What words could ever capture such majesty and such mystery as this living breathing earth. As a living breathing part of this planet I am obsessed with it, and sometimes wish we could live forever, together with our loved ones upon this wild and breathtaking earth. We have our season like the leaves, like the trees. We must live, and love, with just as much colour.
Tegan Bethune 