Perusing all the local news websites the other day, you might have noted that everyone had the same story: The trees are starting to turn. Perhaps you thought: Typical media -- everyone jumps on the same story, and no one writes about all the leaves that aren't turning. What about them? They work hard, keep green, stay on the branch, but nobody gives them any press.
Agreed. Not everyone needs these stories to know fall is here. Some of us are finely tuned to the subtle shifts in our environment that presage the change in seasons -- for example, Little Debbie snack cakes are now available in "Fall" and "Harvest" hues, hideous grinning pumpkins saturated with orange dye. You see those and you know a maple in Duluth has begun to taint its leaf-tips with red, and the squirrels are gaining weight (possibly because you took a bite of the pumpkin snack cake and threw it over the fence).
Two: Every year I feel guilty that we didn't drive Up North and stare at trees. If you've been in the countryside during peak color season, you know it's magnificent, but it's like Mount Rushmore without the patriotic plot. You go to Rushmore, you think: "My, those are enormous heads." After a while, you think, "that's enough looking at the enormous heads." Leaves don't even have a gift shop or an interpretive center. I prefer to have the leaves as a backdrop to something else, but I get the sense we're supposed to head out on the Leaf Opener with binoculars and note how the rare tuttle-birch has assumed its yellow plumage six days earlier than it did last year.
For most of us, it's all local. Doesn't matter if the ash trees are shading toward light umber in Hinckley; it's the tree out front and the tree out back that matter. We have a nervous boulevard tree that always jumps the gun -- blushes red and dumps its leaves before anyone else, as if it was suddenly startled. The other trees are still mostly green, and seem amused: Dude, pace yourself.
I wouldn't mind leaf-turning stories if this fall hadn't seemed like summer fell behind on its mortgage and was evicted on the first of the month. The year seems rushing down the hill without brakes, careening toward the gray, bleak smear of eternal winter. There are two normals around here: leaves and no leaves. A month into no-leaf time, it seems things have always been this way: bare gray branches scratching the bottoms of low scudding clouds. Come June it seems everything was always magnificently lush, an impossibly generous expanse of lurid verdant green blooming into the high blue sky. Anyone in a hurry to get back to No-Leaf Normal? Autumn sets off everything in our souls, from relief to nostalgia to the return of good Midwestern productivity -- but it would be fine if all of that came later than sooner, perhaps.
The appearance of fall also means that Christmas lights are probably available at Target, so get ready. What kind of a winter will we have? That's the other story everyone runs: the annual Farmers' Almanac predictions. They have special formulas -- the position of the planets, sunspots, the thickness of caterpillar coats, the aches in Ma Johnson's bunion -- she's been with the Lord since '76, bless her, but they have the bunions hooked up to a machine in the back room. They never get too specific. You never read "Seventeen days of bowling-ball sized hail will flatten much of Kansas on Oct. 24th" -- they just say it will be cold and snowy. The competing Old Farmer's Almanac, however, has its own special formula, which probably includes something like tidal patterns and the length of squirrel toenails, and its editors say it will be snowy and cold. The fiercely empirical National Weather Service says it will be somewhere in between the two.
Well, we'll get there when we get there. In the meantime, we'll enjoy the gorgeous decline. When things change, the media will be there to tell you: In a few months you'll be able to dig out the paper from 6 inches of new snow, open to this space and read my column about how winter's here. That's what all this stuff is, you'll think. You're welcome! Just doing my job.
jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/blogs/lileks
