Today I take the same road to the same destination of a week before.
This Tuesday, however, the sky is no brilliant blue but a soggy blanket of dull gray. It is a strange twist of cosmic inscrutability that its lofty but drab self should willingly acquiesce to the terrestrial, deigning to allow preeminence to the fall colors of the landscape. A copse of scrub oak adorns a knoll set amidst the greening pasture land. Elsewhere, tangling blackberry bushes appear in numerous, ten-foot-high clumps. Pity the lone tree that lies in the path of these barbed, invading strangler vines.
An ancient apple tree hovers aslant a broken fence of peeling, faded white paint. Yellowing leaves shout their riotous hue to the complacent gray above. Its limbs have not been kept clean, I surmise, as numerous smaller branches and the occasional, undesirable water sprout festoon the lopsided tree with willy-nilly growth. The old tree's saving grace is in its ornamentation of golden apples by the peck that cling tenaciously to their place of birth. No one, apparently, has been on hand to harvest the robust sweetness of this delectable non-irrigated fruit.
An arboreal specimen of Nature gone wild no artist, however skilled, could ever hope to capture successfully on canvas.