1. Gold
I was on the phone with cousins when I stopped mid-sentence.
Something is dreadfully wrong with the forest over there, I thought to myself. How is it possible that the leaves have turned yellow in just the last few days?
My heart was breaking.
There are Pines and Maples and Oaks and Black Walnuts down there. It’s June, for heaven’s sake. The leaves should be green. But the leaves on a large swath of those trees had turned yellow. And there was another bunch just a bit beyond.
I turned around, and there was another bunch behind me in the other direction. And now, it was all around me. Everywhere I looked, the green was changing to a shimmering gold.
“Oh my god you guys,” I said on the phone. “The sun has just come out from behind the clouds before sunset and is lighting the tops of the trees!”
2. Rose
Just as I finished telling them this, I turned to look into the heart of the forest. The golden sunbeams didn’t reach back there, but in the few moments that had passed, the sunshine had changed from gold to pink. There were red sunbeams cutting deep into the woods painting the trunks with vivid stripes of fuchsia and magenta and rose.
“Oh my god you guys,” I gasped into the phone. “The sun has turned neon pink and it’s lighting the trunks of the trees way back in the woods!”
They were patient with me, my cousins on the phone. Because they know this place. And they know the wonder of the gold and the green, of the red and the rose.
3. Echoes
Later when I sat to write all this down, later after that magnificent sunset had faded to gray, a Loon called from across the lake — a loud, deep call, resonating in the canopy of the trees across the water, echoing around the lake. I looked up.
The sunset that had faded was now rekindled and a stripe of neon pink was burning just above the distant treetops in the west.
Then the Loon called again. And again. And again. It called a total of eleven times. Each time its haunting, lonely echo sent goose pimples down my spine.
I have never had a day’s end quite like this.