TRR photo by Ed Wesely (Click for larger image)

The leaves change. Every year about this time, Bert Feldman, my favorite TRR columnist, would pay tribute to the changing colors of our leaves, a mysterious magic that he celebrated until the end of his days.

The colors of the leaves don’t “change” or “turn” in autumn, Bert would reiterate. It’s autumn’s waning light and chill air that whisk away a forest’s green chlorophyll, until other pigments—already within the leaves—are revealed.

Carotene pigments in birches and hickories produce palettes of yellow and gold. Anthocyanins, dissolved in the cell sap, create reds and even wine colors among many maples and some oak leaves.

But before the curtain can rise, a leaf must be walled from its twig by a layer of corky cells that form at the base of its stem. And since that’s been underway in our woods for several weeks, “the stage is set,” as Bert used to say.

Near New Columbus, PA. On a back road—a few miles north of Berwick and the Susquehanna River—are settings that seem frozen in time. The quiet landscape in my picture was peopled, last Sunday, by a single monarch butterfly en route to Mexico, buffeted by the wind and too high to photograph.