Fall in Leaves

We've been enjoying Ann's village tales this fall: here is one from November 8, 2009.  May we enjoy reading many more of her village tales on our Community Street South blog!

My house is nearing completion and it seems that the smallest things can cause the most trouble. Like a thingey adaptor attachment for the end of the track lighting in the living room. It’s the one I don’t have, that the electrician needs immediately, from the store that’s closed indefinitely for renovations. I’ve been into town (Chilliwack), back and forth now, four separate times in search of the thingey device and other necessary whingummies. As I’m a creature of habit, I take the same road each time ... I’m in a hurry and I’m imagining it’s the shortest route.


I travel along the skirt edge of Vedder Mountain, with farms and houses on one side and forested slopes on the other. I still can’t get over how the flat land on which the road lies, angles up sharply on the outside of the right-hand ditch and instantly becomes Mountain. I know that eons ago, the (mighty) Fraser was a torrent in a deep gully between two mountain ranges and has silted up year after year so that we, and all the farms in valley, are ‘floating’ upwards on the rising soil level. It’s still an astounding phenomenon, even when I understand it.

And the colours that the trees turn each year, are no less astounding for happening the same way, every year. The section of road between Yarrow and the Chilliwack River bridge is a favourite of mine ... with small, neat farms, modest but charming homesteads and paddocks with horses and/or ducks.

The mountain side is mostly big-leaf maple, cedar, fir, and hemlock with undergrowth of snowberry, oregon grape and ferns. The farm gardens on the other side of the road have an abundance of all sorts of species of trees and shrubs with more decorative leaves and forms and in many more hues. (We humans like variety, and the unusual, don’t we?)

I notice an escapee from civilized cultivation has hopped over the road and into freedom ... hops! ... it’s shinnying the telephone poles on the wild side. The Fraser Valley used to have many acres of hops in tidy rows. What happened? Do we drink less beer now?

(I don’t think so) Where do they grow hops now? China?

This time of year has always felt more like a brand new beginning, than January 1st. In long past years, it used to feel that way because I was either going to off to a fresh experience of school myself, or sending my offspring.

Now I feel the freshness of the season in a different way ... from the energy emanating from the extravagance of colour in the trees around me ... from the forest getting ready for winter

The colours change in first subtle ways, allowing a mellowing of their green and then they let loose with splendid colours. Each kind of bush, shrub and tree reveals its separate character by its different shades. Nature doesn’t hold back; she’s showy, joyous and exuberant.

I have always known I would enjoy having a handmade house, but I never imagined just how I would have it. And I’ve always dreamed of living in community, but didn’t know how that would come, either. And now, I’m finding a new beginning, in my new house, in a new village in the same way as a forest in fall. In joyous, mature, living colour.

And there are other new beginnings all around me ... construction zones are becoming homes, weedy fields tilled into rectangles and strangers turning into friends. I look out my window at night and see lighted windows where there were none only weeks ago. The routes through the farm are been trod by many feet into pathways.

Our village’s new beginning is like mine. Not freshly new-born, but from the energy of experience, change, consolidation and maturity. Long worked for, long yearned for.

Makes me want to paint the village red.