Featured article: Autumn’s Melancholy Offset by Nature’s Vibrant Hues

I have a new piece up at Pajamas Media about fall coming to the northwoods. This is a companion piece to my article about spring coming to the northwoods that was published at the end of May. Here’s a portion of today’s article:

Late October is always a bittersweet time of the year here in northern Michigan. Unlike the yearning we feel for spring after a hard winter, we feel a bit melancholy as we prepare the equipment from our AuSable River canoe livery for their long winter hibernation.

Cleaning up and repairing the canoes and kayaks for their wintertime trestles and deflating and storing the rafts and tubes in the barn feels a bit like saying farewell to old friends at the end of summer camp. We have our memories of lazy days canoeing down river, watching the trout jump, and while we know we’ll see them again next season when the softening breezes gently awaken the pines and the hardwoods from their winter slumbers, we are still a bit wistful about saying good-bye.

At the same time, though, fall is the most glorious of all the four seasons up north. While hot, leisurely days on the river lull us into sleepy summer dreaming, autumn sharpens our senses. We crawl out of our beds one morning in October to find the air has crisped, as we are jolted out of our summer stupors. The red maples and red oaks recast their lush, green leaves into reds so brilliant that they seem to make the rest of the world around them look drab. As the rich red leaves fall from their branches, they mingle on wooded pathways with the burnished gold leaves of the birch and aspen trees, forming a colorful mosaic — a ground quilt that tempts us from our work to come explore in the wilderness.

Please head over to PJM and check it out.