October in New Hampshire

Route 88 Exeter Road, Hampton Falls

I brought my camera along on my Saturday morning bike ride through Hampton Falls to Exeter. I've only been in New Hampshire 7 years, so I've not got inured to the fall colors or the seacoast, and even though we are past peak leaf peeping season, the colors are still vivid and changing. The sugar maples and beach trees are yellow and orange and the next wave of leaf changes is coming. 

Ice Pond, Hampton

We have two Norway maples in our backyard, those forbidden trees, illegal to buy, transport or plant in the Live Free or Die state, and their leaves are supposed to turn from maroon to bright red, but this year their leaves have simply curled up at the edges and turned a sickly tan and haven't even bothered to fall off the branches yet.

No matter, the sugar maples behind them are all ablaze. 

Dearborn Road, Hampton

The air is clear and there is the occasional whiff of wood or leaves burning, which brings back memories of childhood.  It is still legal to burn your leaves in Hampton, New Hampshire, although my neighbors do not do that much. They tend to rake them or blow them with machines and then deposit them among the trees in their backyards. Since most people around here have at least an acre lot, and the majority have larger lots, there is plenty of room for leaves and compost piles. The town dump (recycling center) is only 2 miles away and they take bags of leaves. 

Where I lived in Maryland you'd have three fire trucks and a police car at your door if you tried to burn leaves and you'd be lectured by all your neighbors about how you'd just contributed to global warming and air pollution by leaf burning. Somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem in leaf country.

Plaice Cove, New Hampshire 

Hampton, New Hampshire 

Fall is beautiful in the East, from North Carolina to Maine, but I'll take Fall in New Hampshire any day. It feels brooding, full of portent and every year this time, I read the paragraph with which Grace Metalious opened Peyton Place, and I feel New Hampshire has a special claim to Fall, even though she is talking about a special sort of Fall, Indian Summer:

Hampton Falls 

"In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an uncharted season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

Towle Farm Road, Hampton

There is so much going in those sentences. We know what this splendid season is heralding. Snow blowers are flying out of the stores. After last winter, even I bought one. We know it is coming, like the invasion at Normandy; we just don't know when.  We are prepared, and we can feel its rumblings, and knowing that autumn will not last, that is is temporary and simply a staging platform for what is to come, invests this time of year with an urgency, a live now for tomorrow...It's like second semester senior year in high school, the last party before graduation and launching into the hard world to follow.

There's a lot going on now.