As we sunk further into autumn with each day the trees began to change. I waited for the tree the sellers had said was a spanish oak to turn a dark maroon like the ones on my neighbors’ properties but it never did. One tree that did begin turning red was my beloved sumac tree. I fretted about it often being that it had grown completely sideways to get out from under the shade of the larger trees around it. It was wedged across another tree’s branch and that appeared to be the thing supporting the skinny horizontal tree. I had an intense need to help it in some way; a need i suppressed as the tree had been doing fine for over twenty years without me and if there was anything i learned about man’s relationship with nature it was that we often fouled perfectly good things up in our quest to make things more efficient or better. Best to leave the tree alone.
By early november the tree’s leaves had gone a pinkish color which would later turn flame red. Unfortunately, by then i was used to the color of the sumacs and spanish oaks all around me and forgot to snap a final picture of the progression.