Fall has always been my favorite season of the year. Part of that was that while summer could be fun, I always enjoyed going back to school, but a large part was the way the world feels. And the trees!
Fall is my “new year” (that date in mid-winter, pah!), and it’s coming!
The first photo (by me) is of a branch of leaves starting to turn on a tree at one of our favorite parks1; the second photo (by my friend) is of the tree and me (and our little dog [one of two] named Audrey) just after I took the photo of the branch of leaves. She is, of course, much more interested in the sniffies than the leaves (her main response to trees seems to mostly involve how unfair it is that squirrels can climb them and she can’t).
One of the things I love about Substack (although I’m going to shift my account over to Ghost as soon as I have the time and oomph, I’ll keep my subscriptions here and keep reading) are all the amazing writers writing about what they love which at times overlaps beautifully with what I love.
In this case, I’ve recently begun reading (and can totally recommend) Tom Kimmerer’s work about people and trees which can be found at his substack, Our Trees.
There are a number of incredible public parks in Bellingham (and many allow leashed dogs because Bellingham is a dog-friendly town—others allow unleashed dogs, and still others no pets at all—there’s a richness to choose from). Greenacres is different: it is a memorial park and cemetery, and it’s where we will be buried in the natural burial part of their cemetery, The Meadows, which I talk about in this post on death and dying (and about Amy Amendt-Raduege’s fantastic book “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.