Timing

Right now it’s Nature’s Mardi Gras. The trees are shaking their cherry, orange, gold, plum, and emerald beads in the form of leaves for anyone with eyes in their head. And it is impossible not to notice. Every road is bathed in these hues. A flaming red maple leaning against the side of someone’s ordinary house makes you slow down and give it a cruise like a pathetic lovesick teen. There’s seeing it all and then there’s looking, really taking it in. The latter demands time, attention, focus—things we have when it’s something that suits us (watching mindless TikTok videos) and are impossible to find when it doesn’t (calling Mom instead of texting. Like, who even has five minutes for that?). As if we were the ones making the time instead of just recklessly spending it.

Currently, in parts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont the foliage is peaking, which is something that no one can shut up about. The colors will be at their brightest, at their most saturated in terms of volume. I get it. Photographers want those autumn money shots. It’s true that the colors will start to lose a bit of their punch. Barren branches multiply; what leaves remain slowly become a uniform palette of orange. I don’t blame them.

But all the horse racing to get to specific locations before the color shifts compresses time in a way that gives me a ton of anxiety. Fall is a whole season, not a one-night-only with Springsteen. I’m out there with my camera, of course. But I lace up for the marathon, not the sprint. Because I’m not so much chasing images as I am hungry for a different experience, one where the minutes hover like fog on a sleepy October morning.  

©SheilaMoeschenPhotography