It is Brisk here! It is September

These two sentences by which I have entitled this posting, make me happy in their coincidence. May they always coincide.

However, my dogwood is already becoming colorful with its red/yellow/green/blue-gray leaves and some of the berries, a few, are tinting toward red. I think this is too early. And the birches out front have graced the walk and the grass with a deep and wide swath of yellow triangular leaves, which I raked yesterday into the flower and shrub beds to be mulch. They, those birch leaves, break down very quickly and feed and fill the dirt that waits for this emendation. I am glad to comply. I am glad the trees share the leaves to enable compliance. Soon, the plum on the other side of the front of my house will begin letting its leaves turn to deep red and flutter to the ground to be gathered and left to roost in the flower beds, the shrub beds, some on the grass.

Recently I was at my friends’ house in the Berkshire mountains area of Massachusetts. Ah, it is a space of space, that Berkshire area. One would have thought that I would have taken lots of photographs of the silence, the wide openness, and the coincident large closeness of woods that ring the fields (or do the fields ring large swaths of forest?). But I did not. I, instead, stood and watched. Sat and saw. Walked and wondered. It brought peace. Except here, one photograph, from in a wood.

A couple of days before that I was bicycling along the rail trail and spotted a stripling of a tulip poplar! I am always happy when I see these. Left to its own devices it can live hundreds of years and grow to be hundreds of feet tall. Generally, here, where ones own devices are never left to, regardless what being one is, the tulip poplar will still grow to about 100 feet, and shower us with its lovely yellow-orange flowers, as well as shade us with its tulip shaped leaves.

I was just thinking about the description of some of the properties of mayapples: “fruit is poisonous until it is ripe. When it is ripe, it is yellow and edible.” Why? Perhaps, when ripe and edible, it also carries a pleasing scent–I admit, I did not put the mayapples in the photograph to my nose–and likely a passing mammal or ground visiting avian will take a bite, maybe just one, like the mockingbirds, baltimore orioles, robins did of the plums on my tree out front, leaving the remaining globe of fruit for another to also taste, or to drop and root another plum tree, and that passing or visiting being will at some present or future point and spot, leave a seed from deep within that ripe, delicious mayapple, and thereby another mayapple may grow. Okay, but why poisonous until then? Maybe because the unripe fruit’s seeds cannot reproduce. Why? I don’t know. But that is a beauty of all that is on this earth. The mystery, even as it lives, it mystifies. Every single thing.