October came and went. About halfway through, I searched for and found my bicycle mittens (gloves?) and this morning, I put on the winter coat for the first time. Summer? What was that again?
Stuff happened, some of it difficult, some of it was delightful, such as a train journey along the Moselle valley to Luxembourg. It's one of these easy trips for people of a certain age, you get on a slow regional train, change after one hour and then trudge along for another two hours, eating a sandwich, looking at vineyards, taking a nap, before you arrive in this laid back city where people look comfortably relaxed and the atmosphere is of the prosperous sure-who-cares kind. If there are homeless people in the city of Luxembourg, they must have been in hiding while we visited. The sun was behind clouds every day, which allowed us to stop for many cups of coffee. It was all extra pleasant.
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It also participated in my first and possibly last writer's workshop. It was Very Nice, we were introduced to various impulse techniques and how to start a sentence and even had a session of short poems and something called tight wrapping. By the end of it, my faced ached from too much smiling and positive vibe beaming. I am not used to write in German all day.
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| found in a bookstore in Luxembourg city |
And to top it all, there is another potentially unpleasant diagnosis hanging over my head. One of these incidental findings during a boring regular check-up. So far everyone involved, including me during daytime, is very calm and ladida about it. Night time is a different matter, imagination etc. Watch this place.
I consider the fact that the leaves only make anthocyanin, the pigment responsible for this red color, at the very end of their life—and no one knows exactly why. We do know that the other colors—the yellows, golds, oranges, and rusty browns—have been there since the leaf first unfurled, beneath the powerful mask of green chlorophyll that reigns throughout the growing season. We know, too, that when leaves sense the coming long nights, they stop producing the chlorophyll that allows them to eat sunlight, and then, at last, we get to see their other true colors within. Not so with the reds. These special pigments are made along with the scissor cells that will cut stem from branch, when the leaves first get the message that they must soon drop to feed the soil below. They know their time.
Why would trees go through the trouble of making this energetically expensive class of molecule in their leaves right before they drop? The ecological hypotheses tend to be defense oriented. For example, leaf anthocyanins may help deter herbivores and pests because they are made alongside other toxic defense compounds and may serve as visual cues to stay away. If this is the case, the red color is incidental, but it works.
When chlorophyll, the molecular engine of the leaf, begins to fade, the leaf becomes vulnerable to the powerful light of the sun. The leaf can no longer transform the light into food the way it used to, and the light that sustained it now threatens to destroy it. So the leaf makes anthocyanin, which acts as a protective sunscreen, buying it more time to make and assimilate precious nutrients for future growth. What travels back to the roots serves the soil and all the organisms living and dying in the leaf litter, the birthing bed of the forest. Though the leaves will remain on the tree for a time, they belong to the turning of the seasons now.
The trees don’t use the last of their energy to extend their singular life.
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