Autumnal Tints

On Thanksgiving morning I woke up in the rosy dawn and saw an explosion of autumn colors outside my window glowing in the early sunlight. People probably say this every time they see an extravagant sunrise, but I really don't think I've ever seen anything like it before. The sky was all streaked psychedelic with pinks and tangerine which gave an electric sizzle to the color of the leaves that lasted all day. Admittedly, I'm rarely awake early enough to see the sunrise unless I'm still up from the night before, so that could be part of the reason why it seemed so incredible. And granted, I had probably taken Percocet the night before.... Oh, Larry, at this point, I don't remember. But it's very likely. Nonetheless, the fantastic autumnal glow made me think of an essay called "Autumnal Tints" by Henry David Thoreau in which he describes his idea for an autumn leaf book. On each page of the book he would duplicate as exactly as possible the color and vibrancy of each variety of leaf around his home in Concord as it acquired its full intensity. "You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever you pleased."

Unfortunately, he never got around to doing it. But that's part of Thoreau's appeal for me---he had plans for several ambitious projects that he never finished. Some were so varied and complex he didn't live long enough to figure out how they would come together. And because he spent so much of his time on what looked to others like a waste of time, many people thought of him as a failure who lacked ambition. Familiar story. Anyhow, he never made his leaf book, but he knew what the leaves looked like and he knew their sequence of change in the landscape. And luckily he did manage to leave his descriptions of these autumnal tints for those who wouldn't see them otherwise, since he also knew that "a man sees only what concerns him."