Autumn Leaves, a Few Predictions
It is only late summer but it is not too early to start talking through our hats about the colors of the trees in the upcoming fall season or, to put it another way, the glories of the autumn foliage.
For its part, 'foliage,' the word, is glad to be in the mix at all.
Like allspice or sage in the kitchen, it is used exactly once a year, and very nearly at the same time of year. I fear that without brightly colored leaves in the third season of the annual cycle, foliage would slip below the waves of the English language entirely.
You look like a reasonable person and your own theory may be that we’ll know how the leaves will look in the fall when the fall gets here and then we'll see how the leaves look, but this is an outdated approach and only stymies conversation.
Talking about the autumn colors before autumn gets here is an ancient and honorable activity and falls into the same category of benign discussion as:
Determining the proper mix of nitrogen and phosphorus in the matter of fertilizer for the tomatoes out back
Whether it is better to starve a fever and feed a cold or vice versa
Exactly how that rhyme goes that encourages sailors to either take heed or delight at the red sky of dawn
The predictive powers of woolly caterpillars crossing the local roadways as to the severity of the upcoming winter, and
Whether hard work ever did anyone any harm, an open question for many of us, with good arguments to be made on both sides.
These are topics that once explored, considered, shaved finely as with a woodworker's plane, sanded, peeled, pared, sifted, shaken, stirred, and nodded over, seldom result in outright fisticuffs or in having vegetables thrown at your head, often in their original cans.
The benefits of talking about autumn leaves that haven’t exactly happened yet and offering an advanced opinion based on some personal folderol about chlorophyll or the like, are twofold.
The first is that no one will remember what you say anyway, particularly if you start now, here in the early innings.
To some degree this is a matter of simple human kindness.
You don’t know a thing about chlorophyll! Everyone knows that! You are among friends, here, mi amigo. Between the two of us we couldn't spell photosynthe...photosyth...photsynthis.... if someone were paying us! It's all good, it's all good. You, like me, just like to hear yourself talk and have lighted on a subject that allows for a very wide degree of latitude in talking about it.
The second is that no one else knows what they’re talking about either, leaving an even playing field.
A few of us have been tracking the matter for some years to the point of jotting down quick notes after a conversation. A day’s worth of exchanges might yield the following forecasts:
Blazing colors due to the wet summer
Disappointing and drab colors due to the wet summer
Medium brilliance followed by a quick denuding of the trees due to the unusually dry summer
Brown and brittle leafage due to the dry summer.
As you see, these fine people can’t even agree on whether this summer was wet or dry, but even if they did it is to be expected that their forecasts wouldn’t change.
These same people, given a dry summer one year and a wet summer the next, will proceed to predict the same outcome in both cases, the exact opposite outcome as they predicted in other years, or, since randomness has its place in probability theory, on occasion the very same outcome…but these last cases are few and far between.
It’s been suggested that no one knows what they’re talking about in this matter, but of course some people do. A branch of science surely exists that predicts with notable accuracy what the leaves of the upcoming autumn will look like, and these fine people are to be admired.
But they are never to be asked.
Actual knowledge from a respected source is the last thing you want in these discourses. This only shuts down conversation and further distances man from man.
How much better it is to concoct a formula that runs along the lines of:
IOSR * BWS /EF+ SSA = AG
It would have been nice to get Energy and Mass in there, as well as the Constant (C) which I would have established as the speed of light, having a fondness for high-performing phenomena that may be particles or may be waves, who knows, but you can’t get everything you want in these equations.
To break it down for the layman, this reads broadly as Inches of Summer Rain multiplied by Boll Weevil Sightings divided by Last Year’s Early Freeze plus Sun Spot Activity equals Autumnal Glory.
It is a complex set of computations. Well it would be wouldn’t it? This is science, my friend, science.
Of course simply due to the variability that is found everywhere in nature, it is also more or less useless.
There is a pleasure in watching men, and it is usually men, talking about something they know absolutely nothing about just as if they do, and it is likely a uniquely human activity.
It is hard to picture lions or squirrels or marmosets having lively discussions about well anything, but if they could they would be eons of Darwinian natural conversational selection away from saying that the Monarch butterflies took off from Canada a full week and a half earlier than last year and that always portends wonderful autumn colors.
The trick, as I have suggested, is to get that big opinion out there early. It will soon be forgotten in the rush of all these other opinions, and then all of them together will be lost in the advent of the actual autumn colors, the thing itself.
And then, drab or dramatic, brittle dry and brown, damply soggy and limp, seemingly composed of a severely incomplete palette of colors like the castoffs of a careless child's crayon collection, or bursting upon the eye as if lit from within their golden depths, this is your signal to say, “See those trees? That’s what I was telling you.”
