WHAT I SEE OR NOT

Norma Tucker

 

I sit at my desk before the sliding glass doors that lead to my balcony garden. The oak tree facing me, the one I’ve watched grow from sapling to full grown, years of changing its color in the autumn from summer green to vivid gold. This year I see only limp green and whimpers of dulled color. No fallings of dried leaves from its limbs to be raked into mounds or to succumb to a leaf blower. 

 

It is past mid-October 2021. A time when the season changes dramatically from summer pastels to vibrant reds and gold, and tinted brown. We anticipate the harvest and holidays. Our palate adapts as summer vegetation changes from stalks to root. This year is different. 

 

The seasons of the past year have given us little time to muse. One season to the next – each defined by hibernation, vaccinated, or not, and the politics of what keeps us from dying. This year we are continually tested as individuals and as a society struggling to achieve something we call normalcy. Humanity is struggling. I am struggling. The natural world is struggling. Fires suck the moisture of forests in the West, record breaking heat in the East. Increasing grief from more destructive violent tornados, volcanos, hurricanes, and wars continuing and ending. What is on the horizon? We cannot fathom, nor trust in the past.

 

My horizon beyond this single tree at this time of year is a hill resplendent - large, lush, colorful trees, an artist’s dream. They remain a reluctant green this autumn, not the glory of yesteryear’s reds, orange and yellow with glints of glaring brightness as the sun ducks in and out of clouds. I ask myself, is it too early, too warm, too wet? Will the next few weeks see the colors change, the influx of fallen leaves left to nourish the earth beneath?

 

Will the winds of late October stir these dry leaves on Halloween – a night of gusts and sweet goodies, ghosts, and giggles. Will by then my horizon change?