Cape Colors

For the beauty of the Cape....

     . . . in its most glorious season, the fall, when the skies are achingly blue, and the winds blow and blow and blow, and the colors come out so slowly, in a far more subtle way than up north, where the sugar maples blaze in glory.

       In our yard we have an oak leaf hydrangea, now a burnished red that almost eclipses its mid-summer glory of ivory, cone-shaped blossoms. . .

. . . and beach grasses like these, which in the fall wave their delicate seed pods in the ever-changing breeze . . .

and even a procrastinating mop head hydrangea blossom or two, which seemed to have over-slept their mid-summer wake-up call, and yet now help us remember that season which seems so long ago, when we splashed through the shallows at Sandy Neck and boated on Lake Wequacket, fired up the grill and roasted corn fresh from Crow Farm, lingered into the evening out on the deck and slept on top of the sheets, windows wide open, serenaded by peepers and crickets.

     How much of this beauty consists in its impermanence, in the bittersweet knowledge that soon it will be but a memory?  (One thinks of how much haiku is written about the cherry blossom).

     Once, in a moment of awareness of my own mortality (how we avoid those moments, and yet how powerful they can be!), I had two thoughts. The first was this: that if I were aware that I only had a short time to live, I would want that time to be in the fall, one last time to savor the transient beauty that paints the landscape in new magnificence every day. And the second was this -- how sad it would be to know that this was the last time I would have that experience; how sad, and yet, how strangely

wonderful.