Peak, continued

Attention must be paid.
Yesterday I took a squinty, long view of this peak phenomenon. Today I took a walk with Carol down to Spy Pond as the sun was taking its final bow, the credits of the day beginning to roll.
Wow. It was intense. I mean the feverish bronzes and fiery o-ranges, crimsons that make you just stare, just feed the eyes. With that late sun vivifying it. This is a good one, for down here. We're not Vermont, but we're getting Vermont colors. Trees like those side-of-the-road farm ones, so yellow you want to yell OW! And this even when some of these big fellas have started shedding their leaves, their red shadows like the green floret shadows of May, but we haven't entered the leaf-falling time, really, with bands of leaves skittering in the headlights like reckless trick-or-treaters. This is the deep-color drink that distracts people from yard sales and sets up Halloween. It's the crisp night-of-day, tell-me-a-story part of October. Like the one about the leaf that clings to its tree, afraid to fall. Until a blue jay explains that all the trees change colors as a kind of night light for the darker days, don't you even know that? Why do you think leaves make a blanket on the ground? For sleeping! So, let go! Which it does, and of course it's not that bad. Not bad at all.