How can I write of anything but the visual on these perfect and perfectly benign autumn days? The soft sky and summer air, from who knows where, sooth the mind, distract me from the bone-dry ground, release my eyes from the page to drift among the sudden reds and unexpected umbers. The ivies, yes, even the poison ones, glow in deep and bright colours unimagined mere weeks ago. I walk this One Acre Wood and stop to smile at a perfect brilliant curl of birchbark on the forest floor, bubbles of neon slime mold at the base of a snag, bursting pink in the slowest slow motion, even the inky scat I guess to be left by the resident skunk. But, oh the pines! Such yellow I have not seen in them before. The needles fall like rain, like pointed barbs about the drought, the bigger unpredictability of Anthropocene, our heedless ways with earth and all who share this sacred space. California comes to mind. When will you burn, you aging pines, if burn you must some day? The maples are already famously aflame, but we do love death in those lovely leaves.