Fall is coming.
Although we are enjoying cooler mornings here, many of the days recently have still been sunny and warm, even hot. But the light is different. I find myself noticing it more, the way it filters through the leaves, the way it bathes the trunk of a tree, the way it falls across the hardwood floor of my bedroom for the first time in months, thick and golden, like honey.
I go out into the yard and stand in this new light. I let it show me what else is beginning to change.
The dogwoods have started to turn, their leaves a mottled rust and purple. They are always the first. I think of them as heralds of good news.
On a walk through the woods I notice the return of familiar late summer and early fall flowers—yellow and orange jewelweed, red cardinal flower, goldenrod. I used to think of flowers as primarily belonging to spring; I’ve been surprised and delighted over the past few years to discover the multitude of flowers that bloom in August and September and October.
I’m also continually surprised by how often I find flowers I’ve never seen before. I have been intentionally paying attention to flowers for a little over two years, and I only go to the same one or two places to look for them. Every so often, the thought will cross my mind that I may have seen all the flowers that grow along my favorite walking trail. And over and over, I am humbled and amazed by the abundance and diversity of beauty in such a relatively small place.
On this particular walk a couple of weeks ago, I saw not one but three kinds of flowers I’d never seen before.
It is good for me to be reminded so often of how little I know, how little I’ve seen.
Maybe it’s some combination of summer afternoon thunderstorms and this new fall light, or maybe it’s a coincidence, but there have been a lot of rainbows recently—three or four of the brightest ones I’ve ever seen, all of them as storm clouds were breaking up near sunset.
Just this week I was at the park with some friends when we saw a big, beautiful double rainbow. Inside the smaller arc, the sky was a pinkish-orange mist. Outside, the sky was clear and deep blue. The perfect contrast, broken by the band of shimmering colored light, made it look like a portal to another world.
What have you been noticing lately as the seasons are beginning to change? What “heralds of good news” are giving you hope that cooler weather and colorful fall leaves are coming soon?