Pilgrimage

Yesterday I made my annual pilgrimage to The Most Beautiful Red Maples in Portland ™. How lucky that the trees just happen to be (more or less) in my neighborhood. I don’t know what exactly it is about these trees, but the fall color they develop is just so vivid and intense—and totally kicks the ass of the red maples on our parking strip. I feel like marching our red maples over to The Most Beautiful Red Maples in Portland ™ and telling them that that is what they should be doing. For crissake--get on with it! It’s November 1st.

The photo above doesn’t quite do the trees justice. There are shades of peach, crimson, scarlet, and pink all somehow mixed in there for maximum effect. And when the sun is on the leaves? Wow. It’s such a treat for me to see these trees, but then again, as has been established in many previous posts, I go more than averagely ga-ga over autumn foliage. As of this evening, there are 82 photos in my fall color Flickr set, all taken within the last two weeks. (Feel free to check them out. Hint: It will only take about two minutes if you view them in slide-show mode.) And the photos uploaded to the Flickr set represent only a fraction of the hundreds of fall color photos I’ve taken in recent days. Just so you know who you’re dealing with.

However, the little boy who lives at the house that owns The Most Beautiful Red Maples in Portland ™ did not know who he was dealing with. As I brazenly snapped photos of the trees, he rode his bike around muttering and singing to himself. After a few minutes he rode up to me and blurted, “Who are you?” as, I suppose, was his right. I wondered if he thought I was some crazy/creepy old lady. I know that as a kid I used to jump to conclusions like that about adults. Especially if they were doing something that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

How to answer his question? I thought of saying, “I’m a neighbor,” but that isn’t strictly true as I live nearly a mile away. Plus, I don’t know. It seemed to me that that would definitely feed into his crazy/creepy assessment. So—a la George W. Bush—I simply didn’t answer the question he asked of me and told him, “I’m just taking a few pictures.”

He had no problem with that and told me, “You can have a leaf. Just be sure to pick one up off the ground—NOT one off of the trees.” What a little martinet! I told him I didn’t need a leaf; I was perfectly satisfied just to take pictures. “No, go ahead,” he insisted, “You can have one, but only one.” Hilarious. Then he lost interest in bossing me around. He picked up a rake, raked leaves for 1.5 seconds, and then got on his bike and rode off.

Kids don’t get me.

So today is Day 1 of NaBloPoMo. So far I’m batting 1,000. Go me! I’ve decided that a cool thing to do would be to check out and comment on another NaBloPoMo participant’s blog every day this month. And here is the perfect tool for doing so: the NaBloPoMo Randomizer, which selected fish puke for me today. (I’ll try not to read anything into that.)