“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood; and sorry I could not travel both; and be one traveler, long I stood; and looked down one as far as I could; to where it bent in the undergrowth”¦” — “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

So begins Frost’s classic ode to indecision and life choices. As I look around me here these days, I am struck by how apt his description of his own imagined woods are when applied to mine. Behind the shed, sloping down toward the road and then up again toward the ridge, the landscape is a blazing yellow from all the young poplar trees still taking hold there. Shifting my gaze toward the woods that abut the main road rewards me with still more yellow light, to the extent that I am hard-pressed to find a single spot of green in its shadows.

It’s a veritable sea of yellows and golds, almost as though each leaf had appropriated for itself a bit of sunlight with which it just cannot seem to part. Even the gray, sunless days don’t detract from the intensity, made more so as the light bounces back and forth between each clump, until there is no place the eye can rest that isn’t the color of sunflowers or buttercups. This is a slow year as far as the leaf drop is concerned, so the poplar leaves remain, day after glorious day, to literally light up the landscape. No care or worry is able to penetrate the awe generated by such a scene.

There is so much going on in the woods during the fall months, particularly in the northern temperate zones where trees are genetically predisposed toward making it through the winter at any cost. Deciduous trees, such as oaks, maples, beeches, birches and ashes, shed their leaves in a complex process that can be reduced to a single word: Survival. Faced with subzero temperatures that would otherwise be fatal to most of these trees, they have no choice but to reject and shed their leaves, which is exactly the area at which the cold would attack and do its most serious damage. The point at which a leaf is attached by its twig to a main branch begins to seal itself with a thick resinous sap as the days shorten, and once it is completely closed off, the leaf falls. The tree is effectively in the process of insulating itself against the cold in much the same way that we use putty to fill in the cracks around windows and doors.

The process does not apply to pine, fir and spruce trees, whose needles are coated in a thick, waxy resin year-round, providing ample insulation against the low temperatures that can be deadly to other trees. These trees do shed their needles, but it’s more a cyclical thing that has to do with new needle production as opposed to a defense mechanism against the cold. While it does tend to occur mostly in late summer or early fall, all conifers do not shed at the same time. Some continue producing     needles all year long, dropping old dead growth only every two or three years.

As the leaves continue to fall from all the deciduous trees, their trunks are once again becoming more visible against the backdrop of lighter, brighter colors. Rain accentuates this starkness even further, creating an almost geometric pattern of both vertical and lateral shapes, especially on the young pines whose growth is still low enough to the ground to create contrast against the background. As I continue to remove some in the spirit of good woodlot management, new vistas are opening up to me that were once just masses of indefinable green shapes.

I never tire of the gifts these woods give me when I take the time to really look. Sometimes I make a point of lingering awhile on an individual shape or color or an interesting configuration of leaf against branch. Other times, I simply allow the great expanse of layered color and texture to do with me as it will, filling my eye and my spirit with sustenance against darker days when this world’s cares seem to come at me from all sides.

Whenever I stop to look long at something or run my hand across it, I also try to open myself up to whatever it is telling me. “Don’t worry,” the wintergreen berry whispers to me from its low place on the forest floor, or “chin up!” cries the blue jay as it flashes in its magnificent blueness through the trees.

“You took the right road.”

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.