Found Things

I’m calling this, “Thoughts on Fall Color”. And if you think these don’t look real, you should see the actual trees.

We’ve been spending the month of October in the mountains, with a quick return home to show up for a supposed jury duty summons that turned out to have been postponed. A trip to town on this side of the break turns out to be a bit of a revelation. I’ve pretty much always though that the best color is kind of gone by by mid-October, but- as we tootle around these last weeks it can well be seen that the first ones were only a prelude- it’s more spectacular now than ever. It’s actually the fantastic yellows that brilliant everything up so much- yes brilliant is for our purposes here a verb. An enchanted land it surely is up here- everywhere you look is an image straight out of olden days, a faery tale, a classic novel. To keep in sync with all this autumnal pulchritude, we do a window display or two from things we’ve found- orange light strings, glass glowing from inside lights pumpkins from India, polyester leaf runners, paper-around -styrofoam pumpkins on sticks, fabric gourds- blue-and-white toile and rubber stem- Xmas-ornament-style jack-o-lanterns, sparkly felt mushrooms. This starts to feel overly-plastic-ed- isn’t the whole point of this kind of little respite to be where you have to come up with things discovered in your natural environment? Well- it’s hard to resist stores overflowing with tempting seasonal plastic at the beginning of the yearly change-over, and the bright leaves I brought in and carefully put in sugar-water immediately dropped all over the place. So far, so commercial- but now we come upon tall black wax candles fashioned as witch’s hats, a true witch broom just of sticks- quite expensive- and find out the burlap ribbon’s made of jute! Throw in a few cattails from a walk down to the pond, and- a real find- pumpkins-on-a-stick- they’re a variety of eggplant- courtesy Whole Foods. All as natural as can be! (squiggly smiley-face here….)

Found treasure on autumn treks….