Grace Note

Somewhere on an island, November's last leaf falls, the final note in the brief but beautiful song of autumn

Who doesn’t love the cacophony of an autumn hillside and its chorus of color? The bass notes of green, the alto of oranges and reds, a sprinkling of yellow as the high notes. All of it swirling and spinning in the October wind as if some unseen hand is spinning the kaleidoscope. Who doesn’t love that?

Me, or at least not photographically.

I love being outside on an October day when the path sings and crinkles beneath your boots and the chilled air tingles your teeth like peppermint. But the exuberance and gaudy splendor of peak fall colors - the mainstay of the October pages of seemingly every northwoods wall calendar — is, to be honest, too much for me.

“Simplify, simplify, simplify!” Thoreau famously said, “… let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail." I know he was talking about responsibilities and social affairs. Still, a “thousand” or “a million” autumn leaves all glittering with color and visually shouting “look at me, LOOK AT ME!” is more than I can bear. So, I expand the advice to include the realm of autumn color and “simplify” my search, keeping my autumn leaves “as two or three and not a hundred.”

On autumn days I find my camera turning away from the crescendo and searching for more simple things – a single red maple leaf with a heart of gold, a lone tree leaning into the butterscotch light, the stained glass reflections of autumn colors on the water, the last leaf clinging to the memory of color in the increasingly black and white world.

I look towards November, rather than October for my own tastes in leaf-peeping, after the string of out-of-state license plates have had their fill of October’s eye-candy and turned south for home. That is when I sit and listen with my eyes for the last leaf, that leaf that whispers, not shouts, of the changing season.

One of my favorite memories of searching for that last leaf in the islands came on a day of morning mist and fallen leaves a couple of years ago. Early November, most of the leaves gone but still a rinse of color in the islands.

My friend Bob Jauch, who delights in these islands as much as I do, joined me for one last trip aboard the Little Dipper, a late season celebration to fill our pockets with the last of autumn’s warmth. We wandered like a spiraling leaf but ended up at the dock on Quarry Bay. He was so anxious to walk the beach and collect the last color like pocketsful of dried leaves to hold him over the monochrome months of winter, that I stayed behind drinking coffee on the dock, letting him have the thin strip of beach to himself.

Little did I know that I was positioned for a parade. A string of current was running, it seemed, directly from the edge of the beach where the leaves were falling, out passed the end of the dock where I was sitting. A chorus line of autumn leaves pirouetted in that current right at my feet. It was as if I’d found a river of colorful falling stars in a backwater of the night sky. Each one taking its own solo dance against the blue-green water.

It was autumn at a more sane pace, the season simplified. True beauty, it seems to me, lies as much in the details of a single leaf as in the flourish of fall hillsides. I sat sipping coffee, watching the solo dancers passing each in turn spotlighted by a ray of November sun, thinking each one would be the last, a kind of grace note on the season.

But they were still passing when Bob came walking back down the dock where we had cleated the Little Dipper. He stood silently a moment, noticing my reverie, and then asked “See any good color?”

“Perfection,” I answered.

We slipped the lines, cleared the dock, and started out of the bay. Just as we pulled away I caught a speck of color and turned to see, on the transom of the Little Dipper, a single red leaf clinging to the edge of the boat. My attention turned to safely getting underway and so I powered up, and brought the Little Dipper up on plane and pointed safely towards home.

When finally I looked again, the leaf was gone. Autumn, it seemed, was over.

— Jeff Rennicke

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