Picturing autumn has been difficult.  So much of the spectacle happens far away, and if there is anything I like a camera for, it’s getting close.  Siennas and ochres and vermillions trace the horizon of roller-coastering hills, containing the uniform fields of sandy colored stalks – maybe corn, maybe soy – waiting to be chewed up by mega-harvesters, and sent on their way to fuel someone or something.  The low afternoon light seems to articulate every leaf as it lifts and twists obediently in a gust of wind a quarter of a mile away.  Its all I can do to tear my eyes away and get back to watching the road ahead.   These distant visions are something I can’t keep or be a part of.  I just have to let them transmigrate into the rear view mirror, then disappear – another soul that can’t be trapped.  The trees are showing off entirely for themselves – some kind of reward for a summer well spent spinning sunlight into gold.

For today, I guess I am giving up on the mind-blowing glut of color that is ravenously consuming the green on every hill and roadside and city street in the vicinity of Verona, Wisconsin.  Not because I am not frantic with delight in it – just the opposite, in fact.  My eyes, my field of vision, have so far proved too puny to reckon the scale of autumn’s achievement this year.  Leaves red like they tore your heart out; molten yellow rippling in the breeze; and every shade of fire and ember playing out in between.  My arms just aren’t big enough to embrace it all.

I might have a go again tomorrow, though.

Little spoons
slurping up star-shine
at last shine it back
to the stars.

At the risk of stating the obvious, much of the time when I take pictures with my phone, I can’t see anything.  (Well, I can hardly see anything.) The screen is black-shiny and dull-grimy from greasy fingers and ears.  I am too cold or too hot or too bent too uncomfortably into some photo-yoga contortion to watch the viewfinder for very long.  I take pictures anyway.  Occasionally this results in seeing something.  Felicitous, visual accidents beyond the confines of deliberate craft are irritants.  If they can’t be repeated, how can you know their true value?  What do they signify about the creator and the viewer?  Have I succeeded or failed?

It seems like the leaves have all the answers to those questions.

The story is this:  summer is blowing away, carried to ground in yellow corpuscles riding thick-misted turbulent skies which admit no slant of the sunlight that formed into green only days ago.  In the library parking lot, I saw this was so, and felt guilty ignoring my part.  And though I tried my best, my camera was the only honest witness to the leaves’ unwinding.

These are the good old days…
                             – Carly Simon

For about a week, the weather has been intensely blue, shimmering gold sunlight and leaves so pungently red the maples seem to be blooming fire.  In front of Oakwood Village Senior Living facility, a family of 3 or 4 young trees gather all the sunshine into their yellow leaves, illuminating Mineral Point Road as decadently as any aspen covered mountain side, while the busses grumble by.  I’ve been making excuses to myself about why I wouldn’t stop to find pictures among these wonders.  Too tired, not feeling inspired, can’t risk hurting my back again.  Like most excuses, mine seemed very, very good.

The rain finally came today.  It’s not like the rain spoils the autumn presence of maples and aspens and ash, and even the leathery russet of oaks – far from it.  The water saturates their colors and blackens the structure of their branches.  And together, the leaves and branches lean closer to the soggy earth, as rain accumulates along the crevices and bark and twigs and veins.  You’d think it would be very picture perfect, and you’d be right.  Still, for the sake of my reasons, I drove past fence rows of cherry pink euonymous, not stopping to thank them for holding winter at bay with their furious color.  All my reasons – anxieties, important errands, embarrassment, discomfort – made a lot of sense to me at the time.

But today the rain finally came, and suddenly I wanted a picture from sunny day.  Everyone knows today’s rain means autumn can’t go on forever.  And we think we know what’s coming, after the trees finally disrobe down to their skinny arms and legs, and the snow tires are on the car.  But all we really know is yesterday the yard was full of orange leaves, star-shaped and perfect, waiting for us to rake them before it rained.

The light was suddenly so pretty on the bookcase, from where I was sitting on the couch, reading and ruminating.  Moments earlier, I was caught in one of the dilemmas that has defined my character throughout my life:  the fight to somehow quell a sense of emotional injustice without confessing that I deserved my punishment.  This demon is so persistent that only one way has been left open to me – a detente.  I am trying to take a further step, beyond ceasing inner hostilities.  Since this contorted self-reflection goes where I go, lives where I live, I have to ask myself not only “How do I live with it?”  but, “Aren’t other people suffering in exactly this same way?”

And so I cling to a deep feeling in my heart that my best, truest chance to connect with other people, comes from sticking with my demon the way it has stuck with me.  I will not find that experience at any other more blissful address.  And I won’t be humble, and I won’t be right.  But I will be brave enough to let the light on plastic roses get me off the couch, and see what happens next.

I visited the pond a few days ago.  On a scale of natural wonders, I guess it is really more of a puddle.  Spectacular beauty rubs me the wrong way, like positive people and too much organization – so I am happy walking around my puddle, seeing what there is to see for 20 minutes or so.  The path is pretty short from the edge of the parking lot to the fork that follows the pond, so I often just stand there, to make the trip last longer.  Standing still at the fork in a path has its rewards.  On Tuesday, I stopped because I realized I was expecting to hear a lot of bird song, and there wasn’t any.  “Have the birds already left for the winter?”  I wondered.  Maybe they felt the portents of a bitter, implacable freeze poised to seep into every crevice of feather and grass, and literally flew the coop.

So I stood.  And gradually, as often happens when you stop moving, the world came to me. It was true, the birds weren’t singing.  But along the willow branches that skim the pond’s surface, and between the rigid skeletons of milkweed crowded with seed pods, pale brown and yellow bellies flashed, grey and blue black feathers shimmered.  Suddenly, I saw they were everywhere – goldfinches, chickadees, grackles – even a robin.  They moved restlessly in crowds and alone, from the birch behind the path, to the deep green shadows near the water, with purpose, not play – intently fulfilling some instinct that only they have the wisdom to follow.

I can’t wait for some better chance to see something beautiful.  My little puddle surrounded by birds and thoughtless asters is already more than I know how to say.  I come to this path because I can’t be anywhere else.  At least nowhere I can see more constellations of starry flowers today.

A broken branch spilled apples on the ground.  I guess someone was climbing where they shouldn’t.  But what could be more tempting than an apple tree, when it looks like the perfect fruit is just over…there…if I can…reach a little…farther…

I want to say something about how my pictures are looking lately – all unsharp and de-composed.  I get to reference my own photography and critique it and explain it, because well, this is a self-conscious blog, and you know what you are in for if you bother reading this far.

Sharp pictures are just not making me that happy anymore.  I made a sharp version of this, more or less.  But sharp doesn’t give me the feeling that I have crawled through the lens, and into the image.  This place seems like an entryway or a passage, but I don’t know where to.  The camera seems to be my way in.  I am more interested in seeing the apples becoming something, than I am in seeing exactly how they are.  And I am becoming something, too.

Dane County (where I live) has a good number of family owned apple orchards, and when you think about it, growing apples seems like a pretty decent way to spend your time.  The orchard where Lizzie and I went on Sunday was only about a 15 minute drive from her house, or to put it another way, 5 minutes past the Target on Mineral Point and Junction.  Madison is still like that – every cornfield that sprouts another Target pushes you closer to another farm, but that means the drive to get someplace pretty can be pretty short.

The sun was baking the fruit at the top of the trees, and stewing the smashed “drops” lying beneath the branches.  The place smelled like apple pie, or to put it another way, Heaven.  People were milling around the larger trees – the Cortlands, especially, with their large yellow and red fruit – wondering how to reach the tantalizingly ripe apples held frustratingly high in the trees.   Harvesting apples for fun is a modern sort of  tourism – you really don’t want to have to work too hard at it.  Scrounging fruit from the ground, on the other hand, is behavior all human beings can be proud to call their own.  Ruling out climbing as dangerous to life and limb (for both the tree and herself) Lizzie foraged around among the Cortland drops, found 2 full bags, and got them weighed.  Then we walked up the steep hill, past the tire swing, to the eating apples.

The allees of Empires were wide, and almost deserted.  A tall 8 year old could easily have pulled a branch within reach, and picked 100 Empires, and had their choice of trees to do it.  Lizzie was done picking, however, so we found a good apple on the ground and shared it as we walked.  Crisp, white, and warm, it was like a message from another century.  I found mostly pictures that felt like that to me, too – despite trying to see where the Kinfolk photographers would have looked.  I thought of the snapshots people made to send with letters home,  showing their prize dahlia, or how beautiful the viburnum was that year.  A record, nothing more, bluntly proclaiming the truth of so many apples, held high in the sun, waiting to be picked.

I miss the alleys in Chicago.  Like boulevard sidewalks, they present a dimension of living space that we don’t occupy very often anymore, and certainly not where I live now.  In an alley, there is plenty of room to drive or stroll, yet civilization lies just beyond the chain link and trash barrels.  As you pass the backyards, you feel as though people have already invited you in, like you have made friends a little bit.  Some people care a lot about how their backyards look, but other people don’t, and that’s fine.  It is a backyard, after all.

For the most part, you don’t see a lot of large shade trees overhanging the alleys – they interfere with utility vehicles, and anyway, there are plenty of street trees for shade.  In an alley, the daylight trades places from brick to asphalt to siding, setting the wrong things aglow, things that shouldn’t want your attention.  In an alley, you can catch sight of the day spending the last of its magic without anyone else noticing, and still make it home in time to watch Jeopardy.

****

“I like the other Brenna.  I don’t like this Brenna.”

This isn’t something Max or Cas said to me.  I heard it from grown woman a few weeks ago.  I thought we were friends, but apparently not.  She was only friends with the other Brenna.