It is leaf season in Portland! After hanging around on trees all summer, tons of photosynthesizing bits are giving up the ghost and decorating our neighborhood.
We are now at that magical, all-to-short period between green leaves on the trees and slimy, slippery leaf mulch in the gutters. It makes me so happy that I dash about like a squirrel, taking pictures of the lovely, pre-mulch mosaic.
The city of Portland has major infrastructure dedicated to collecting these masses, and most (but not all) of our neighbors are very good about clearing them away. We appreciate this, even as we watch the color drive away, because wet leaves can really trip you up. No one wants to start winter off with a busted hip.
The Fall brings so many changes. Green leaves become brown and yellow. Brown branches, now blooming with moss, become green. Colorful flowers die back and are replaced by Christmas lights.
Transitions are sweet, kissing one season goodbye and welcoming another. Happy Fall.
Maybe it’s because our summer has been so hot and dry, but Fall is falling hard here in Portland. Leaves are falling in piles earlier than usual. The change from heatwave to rainfall seems more abrupt.
In our lovely, funky Sunnyside neighborhood, the lush flowers of summer are dying back, waiting to be trimmed into their winter rest.
Plum, apple, and fig trees are all over the neighborhood, planted decades ago by resourceful homeowners. Some folks gather them up and share them, which is really nice. One house on Taylor Street even provides little boxes to take them home!
Other folks seem overwhelmed by the abundance and the fruit just falls and rots, smelling like a brewery. Not terrible, but a terrible waste.
Piles of leaves are everywhere. They make for a seasonal carpet and art materials, as well as pulling nutrients back in the soil. But I know once it rains, we will have ‘leaf slime’ in every gutter.
So it is when summer ends. There is a melancholy, especially when it feels like Covid has cheated us of another summer’s concerts, plays, and festivals. But I am ready for Fall. The inside time and contemplation, and the creativity that come with it, are okay by me.
Fall is the time for endings and beginnings. The trees teach us that, and here in our neighborhood I have lots of teachers!
It’s Conker season!
The huge oaks and chestnut trees are shedding their leaves, which have danced all summer long.
Sweet chestnuts and acorns
They are casting their collective futures to the wind as seeds come clonking to the ground. Acorns, chestnuts, fir cones, and tiny maple helicopters fall and fly and eventually pile up, hoping to find just the right place to take root.
Golden Rain tree with its maraca-seed pods
I think it is fitting that our human institutions are tied to this idea of endings and beginnings. Summer ends, school starts. Elections allow for new directions for our city and country.
So much is going on here in Portland! The rains have started for sure, with two and a half inches just this past weekend. As the leaves fall in Laurelhurst Park, what was the darkest part of the park is becoming the lightest, with a thin veil of yellow leaves creating a wonderful light.
The weather is getting colder, hovering about 48 degrees at night and 55 degrees during the day. All this means adjustments have to be made.
Vacuuming the Lone Fir Cemetery
Newly Light Forest
The city is keeping up with the leaves by using giant, ride-on lawn vacuums to clean the paths in our Laurelhurst Park, because all the leaves get slippery and really dangerous to walk on when they start to rot. This picture shows the difference between a clean path, and a not-clean path.
Yes, there is a path there!
There is also a truck that drives through Lone Fir Cemetery and blows the leaves and chestnuts off the paths, and ride-on mowers that mow the grass and vacuum up the leaves off the graves.
At our house, we are getting ready for colder weather, too. We found some big saucers to put our potted geraniums on inside, because the freezing weather that is coming will be too cold for them to stay on the back stairs. These are Great Grandma Billie’s geraniums, and I love them very much and want to protect them. We have also put matches, candles and flashlights on the counters, just in case we have a blackout from trees falling on power lines.
Happy ferns
Plants and animals are adjusting, too. The old Labrador down the street is spending less time on her porch, ferns are growing out of the bark on almost every tree, and moss is blooming on stone walls, sidewalk cracks, and tiny libraries. Mushrooms are springing up at the bases of trees.
Mushrooms!
Oh, and remember the linden trees? They smelled so pretty and gave us shade? Well now, they are making berries for the birds. The petals, instead of falling off, have become thick and waxy, with beautiful blue berries in the center. Amazing!
Linden Berries
All these changes are fun to watch, because I don’t know what’s coming next! But I will tell you about it, whatever it may be.
Dear Liza 