Columbus Day

Columbus Day, Erin's favorite holiday/not. This is traditionally considered the peak of the foliage season. With the advent of global warming, however, it now occurs later in the year. It's been a strange season so far. Many of the trees are unusually green, but some of the maples are already past peak.
Fall foliage is one of nature's great mysteries. In some years the colors are vivid. On misty mornings the brightest colors seem to give off their own light. Some years the colors are dull. No one really knows why. This year it actually seems something of a mix. Trees in the back are muted, but I've seen some really beautiful ones.
I think it was last Columbus Day that I was down in Manchester doing some soliciting for the Hunger Banquet at the VZC. I walked past a couple speaking a language from the Orient; maybe Japanese or Chinese. People come from all over the world to bear witness to the beauty we see every year right in our own back yards.

At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then, four miles above those mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shown-- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom.

The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen