Every walk in the park now seems more wintry than the last. Today, the trees were clinging on to the final few desperate leaves, and the bare branches were stark against the grey sky.
There is one oak tree though, right by the playpark, that's still laden with brown leaves. I recognised it as a tree I tried to climb back in the spring. I remember that I'd got into the nook where the two main branches split off from the trunk, and then had to stay there for ages because I couldn't find a way down again. For some reason, that tree, the Rogue Oak, is replete with foliage still. What, I wonder, makes it so ebullient in the autumn?
The Pagoda Tree is leafless. The Apple Tree is looking threadbare, and even the Shelter Tree, under which I sat for hours in the early summer, is now just a frame through which you can see the sky. It had a flavour of winter.
According to my official Six Season Theory though, winter begins at Christmas. And to be fair, it wasn't shudderingly cold today so I can still go along with it being Hood's Autumn for a few more weeks, I suppose.
It might be the Rogue Oak is old and needs its leaves a little longer than the others. Deep roots might be stretching to water the other trees can't find. It might be that it's just a little more sheltered and the rough breezes haven't troubled it.
Of course, all the deciduous trees need to lose their leaves eventually, or the water in the cells freezes and prevents the growth of new leaves next summer. It's a beautiful ballet of old giving way to young, of letting go of one season to prepare for the next. The letting go is the survival. I expect I'll be back one of these wintry days to find the Rogue Oak has joined the Pagoda Tree and the Shelter Tree and shaken off 2020 completely.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
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