Nothing Gold Can Stay

Something about the color of the leaves this year just has me completely captivated.  I’ve been taking pictures of them constantly.  We live in a wooded neighborhood surrounded by battlefields and it is just amazing the colors I have seen.  We have 27 trees in our yard and we only live on one half acre!  Cleaning up the leaves after the first hard frost has taken away the beautiful colors is not fun.  We don’t have the right equipment to properly remove the leaves.  It takes days and sometimes weeks for John to rake them, mulch them, and move them out of the yard.  The kids and I try to help, but we are easily distracted by jumping into the piles.  They do the jumping, I do the picture capturing.

I am not a gifted photographer.  It’s difficult for me to capture the beauty of what’s right in front of me, but I try, boy to I try!  So, this post is mostly just some pictures I have taken within our neighborhood of some gorgeous trees.  The kids are LOVING fall.  You will see how much in the photos. 

 I truly do see God using the landscape like a canvas.  I can’t quite say where else the deep hues we see would come from.  I realize there is a biochemical change going on, but even scientists have admitted they can’t quite figure it all out.

It reminds me of the poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”  If you aren’t familiar with it, here it is:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down today.
Nothing gold can stay.

Even if you live in a place where you haven’t seen much color besides green this year (my sister in Florida), or you live in a place where snow has already touched the ground (our friends in Wyoming), I hope you enjoyed autumn.  The color is only with us a few short weeks, but it is amazing isn’t it?

Thank you for reading.