I discovered a new face of autumn today while I watched the trees fall off to sleep.

I admit up front that autumn has always been my favorite season. (I will not deny that a slight waver is experienced when viewing the breath-taking plethora of spring's greens.)

Autumn suits me. I like the crisp, clean air: humidity is gone; all the pollen has fallen. Leaves, devoid of their summer green, transform into millions upon millions of brightly colored flags waving rhythmically to the swirls of brisk autumn breezes. At dawn there's a slight hint of coming ice in the air, but at dusk, standing in a mowed hayfield, you get the perfume of apples fallen in an orchard far away.

The fact that the stunning beauty of a New England autumn can be explained via scientific processes, does nothing to detract from experiencing it. In fact, knowing what was going on in the physical world, makes that experience that much grander.

Here's a totally copied summation of autumn-leaf color information taken from Wikipedia. It explains the phenomenon way better than I could:

"A green leaf is green because of the presence of a pigment known as chlorophyll, which is inside an organelle called a chloroplast. When they are abundant in the leaf's cells, as they are during the growing season, the chlorophylls' green color dominates and masks out the colors of any other pigments that may be present in the leaf. Thus the leaves of summer are characteristically green.

Carotenoids are present in leaves the whole year round, but their orange-yellow colors are usually masked by green chlorophyll.[6] As autumn approaches, certain influences both inside and outside the plant cause the chlorophylls to be replaced at a slower rate than they are being used up. During this period, with the total supply of chlorophylls gradually dwindling, the "masking" effect slowly fades away. Then other pigments that have been present (along with the chlorophylls) in the cells all during the leaf's life begin to show through.[6] These are carotenoids and they provide colorations of yellow, brown, orange, and the many hues in between.

The reds, the purples, and their blended combinations that decorate autumn foliage come from another group of pigments in the cells called anthocyanins. Unlike the carotenoids, these pigments are not present in the leaf throughout the growing season, but are actively produced towards the end of summer.[6] They develop in late summer in the sap of the cells of the leaf, and this development is the result of complex interactions of many influences — both inside and outside the plant. Their formation depends on the breakdown of sugars in the presence of bright light as the level of phosphate in the leaf is reduced."

That is just so cool. Here we have a bunch of chemicals interacting in complex ways in the physical world, and yet we can perceive that process as beautiful rainbows painting the forests above our heads. 

Til now, I've always felt autumn was past when leaves went brown and began to fall. The end of autumn was when I had to sweep the porch steps every day to remove the cookie-cutter shaped, two dimensional brown corpses that piled up. When a breeze comes by, the leaves still in the trees and those carpeting the ground rustle and scratch out whispers. Conversations is a foreign language. It's as if the leaves absorbed the chatterings of migrating birds who rested in the branches earlier, to fall later and give up those bird thoughts at the slightest disturbance caused by man or wind. One last echo before irrelevancy. But whether silent or verbose, they have to be raked; gotten rid of before turning into soggy piles of something during spring. Until today, hanging brown leaves and piled fallen leaves were an annoyance. I look up only to gauge how much longer it will take for everything to finally come down.

But as I was riding as a passenger during a rain-soaked day, contemplating smugly how humans got themselves to a point that we can create personal environments to keep ourselves comfortable whatever the "outside" might be, I glanced outside to find a transformed world. Trees with hanging leaves became giant brass statues capped with the copper tones of rolls of pennies. Leaves carpeting the bases of the trees, limp from the rain, merge into glacial rivers of barely molten copper. It's such a different landscape that one could be on the surface of some other planet; or maybe this one in a different dimension. It was beautiful.

At least to me. I have been attracted to metallic-toned items since childhood. I like copper, bronze, stainless steel, pewter. Lead even. Don't get me started on mercury (the real silver liquid stuff, not that red thermometer crap). Wish I had the talent to paint what I saw today. Tomorrow—for the next week—I will go outside and squint that world back into being.