The final rites of Late Fall include a chronology of the last leaves and fruits.
Sometimes beeches, oaks or Osge trees and are the last to lose their leaves.
Sometimes, mock orange or lilacs outlast all the other shrubs. Sometimes forsythias or hardy honeysuckles are the last to go..
Winterberry fruits are losing their white outer shells, their red cores unveiled by the cold.
Orange bittersweet berries fall to the woodland floor.
New England aster and sedum foliage turned a dusky yellow in early November; now the plants are shedding.
Garlic and garden lettuce and autumn rhubarb have stopped growing.
Most all the seeds are gone from milkweed pods; just a few wisps of down cling to their shells. Fragile pokeweed stems have exploded in the frost.
The last roses have often been frozen by nights in the teens.
And.....as the earth loses all of summer, I try to find as many remnants as I can. In her novel, The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama describes how it is: “Maybe it’s the light that gradually grows darker," she says, "making everything seem less trivial, forcing you to look harder to find your way.”
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with more notes on the seasons. In the meantime, look harder to find your way through the cold ahead.
