end of autumn
Dec. 5th, 2017 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliIn the green trees, one stands scarlet -- with the leaves on the upper branches showing the darkening and shriving that shows the frost is getting to them.
The air is moist. On other days, it's clammy in the cold, or raw. Today it's soft and promising, with prospect of rain. Until the sun burns down and makes it stifling.
Two trees, side by side. One towering, and every leaf on it pure red; one broader, and every leaf on it flame orange.
I pull back the curtain to -- white. White fog filling the air, white frost lining the ground. Minute inch by, and light increasing, frost melting, shows such details as the pale green grass holding up its silvery veil. And when I drive off, the sun is visible through the clouds as a pale, featureless disk, not even luminous.
Cold strikes. Plants perish. Even the next day, some are dark as if rotten, and others are withered and brown. Snapdragons look impervious, but I know to wait. They, and some of the more intact flowers, may yet show signs. Days before all is revealed. (Especially when it's going to be cold again tonight.)
Into the low evergreen bushes beside me, a pair of sharp red ears hop. I blink and stop my walk. And true enough, a dapper fox, brightly autumnal red, hops out the other side, and gives me a wide berth and many sidelong glances. The sky had not even turned colors with sunset, though the sun cast long shadows.
White crystals encased the car when I got up. Half way to ready to leave, they were half melted off, as soon as the sun struck. Walking out, I saw a double line across the lawn: not only was one side shadow and the other sunlit, the first side was white, and the other green.
A crescent sun -- just peeking out from behind the cloud, still, in the crescent form, veiled enough in cloud that you can see the burning silver.
Geese, great skeins of them, so high in the sky that the V's do not seem to hold large birds, but nothing larger than pigeons
Wind blows over the grass, bending it over in waves -- giving us whitecaps on the lawn.
A great flock of small birds shifts and swirls over the parking lot, like smoke.
Two little house sparrows perch on the branches, delicate and subtle shades of brown on cheerful little birds.
All alongside the highway, winterberry grows. With the winter, it is indeed winterberry: otherwise bare branches bedecked with brilliantly red berries. Some of them are enormous and covered with red.
High up in the sky, so tiny to the eye as to look like swallows, a skein of six geese fly in a v.
The air is moist. On other days, it's clammy in the cold, or raw. Today it's soft and promising, with prospect of rain. Until the sun burns down and makes it stifling.
Two trees, side by side. One towering, and every leaf on it pure red; one broader, and every leaf on it flame orange.
I pull back the curtain to -- white. White fog filling the air, white frost lining the ground. Minute inch by, and light increasing, frost melting, shows such details as the pale green grass holding up its silvery veil. And when I drive off, the sun is visible through the clouds as a pale, featureless disk, not even luminous.
Cold strikes. Plants perish. Even the next day, some are dark as if rotten, and others are withered and brown. Snapdragons look impervious, but I know to wait. They, and some of the more intact flowers, may yet show signs. Days before all is revealed. (Especially when it's going to be cold again tonight.)
Into the low evergreen bushes beside me, a pair of sharp red ears hop. I blink and stop my walk. And true enough, a dapper fox, brightly autumnal red, hops out the other side, and gives me a wide berth and many sidelong glances. The sky had not even turned colors with sunset, though the sun cast long shadows.
White crystals encased the car when I got up. Half way to ready to leave, they were half melted off, as soon as the sun struck. Walking out, I saw a double line across the lawn: not only was one side shadow and the other sunlit, the first side was white, and the other green.
A crescent sun -- just peeking out from behind the cloud, still, in the crescent form, veiled enough in cloud that you can see the burning silver.
Geese, great skeins of them, so high in the sky that the V's do not seem to hold large birds, but nothing larger than pigeons
Wind blows over the grass, bending it over in waves -- giving us whitecaps on the lawn.
A great flock of small birds shifts and swirls over the parking lot, like smoke.
Two little house sparrows perch on the branches, delicate and subtle shades of brown on cheerful little birds.
All alongside the highway, winterberry grows. With the winter, it is indeed winterberry: otherwise bare branches bedecked with brilliantly red berries. Some of them are enormous and covered with red.
High up in the sky, so tiny to the eye as to look like swallows, a skein of six geese fly in a v.