Slow trek to teahouse rocks raked

Row upon flow around steps

Passing one perfect blossom

Geese oblivious above

It is Indian Summer here.  The early morning sun yesterday was unimpeded and as brilliant as a spotlight on the fall foliage.  We have had fall color now for almost a month.  That’s the way it was forecast to go.  The summer was cool and wet, and bushes and trees especially did not suffer from drought.   They have turned from green to color in wave upon wave this October.  It is a fall that photographers hope for every year. 

But, it isn’t perfect.

In my mind all the foliage should be in color.  In reality not even on the same tree are the leaves fully in color.  As I walk along the sidewalk no tree and no bush is perfectly turned.

That’s just my mentality.  Sometime in my life, I came to believe the fantasy that things could be picture perfect.  I suppose that comes from a childhood of calendar photographs in which entire Vermont forests were riotously in color from October 1 to 31 followed by a month in which a wild turkey, tail fully spread, paused in contemplation of Thanksgiving.  I think my fantasy is also fed by driving at speed.  When I drive, my attention is seldom on individual trees or bushes.  My short term memory  blends the trees just passed into red trees or yellow ones or still green ones.

In reality as I was walking this morning I just stopped in front of one imperfect bush.  Had I just walked past it, I would have remembered it as a neon red vision.  But, no.  The leaves were in an infinite variety of shades from green to neon red.  I wanted to see the red, but the bush was really a Christmas tree of different colors.

No wonder Japanese tea masters took the simple expedient of decapitating an entire garden of flowers in order to leave the one perfect blossom so that their guests could enjoy the beauty of nature in the master’s garden.  Those guys figured out a long time ago that reality was never picture perfect.  And, you can’t have that in a proper tea ceremony during which the smallest details are to be savored.

I thought about that standing in front of the bush that was so messily turning red.  Maybe I could just pick off all but the single perfectly neon leaf.

Unfortunately I got caught up in observing all the different colors on that one bush.  It did not take a lot of imagination to see the whole annual life cycle of the bush happening leaf by leaf all at the same time.  Much more interesting to see and a lot less work than trying to get rid of all the not-quite-neon-enough leaves.  Much more enjoyable and complicated than my stripped down picture of perfection.