In Its Own Season

A Forest Pathologist.

I didn’t know there was such a specialty, but it makes sense, I guess.

This particular scientific expert was quoted (on the radio morning news that I happened to be listening to while engaged in my morning walk) as saying that the combination of rain that we had received, -lots of it coming at exactly the right time- along with sunshine, and whatever else goes into the magic mix, was going to make for a brilliant Fall foliage season this year.

Surrounded as I was by my own beloved forest at that point in time, I momentarily got lost in an anthropomorphic fantasy.

Forest as a body, forest as a being. Needing it’s own pathologist... Beautiful bones and green hair...

I shook my head. Snap out of it. Tree trunks and foliage. That’s better. The news continued- something about the election now- but I had ceased to listen to it...

“They don’t even know why it happens,” I said to myself, “The color, you know, and the leaves...”

Maybe, just maybe, an expert such as a Forest Pathologist could come up with some sort of convoluted explanation as to why the beautiful colors are evolutionarily significant, but if so I haven’t heard it yet.

That doesn't really matter, though. The fact that men of science have to pause for a moment, have to stretch a little, to explain away this Fall phenomenon is proof enough for me that Pure Beauty exists... for its own sake, in its own season.
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