Floating leaves

Summer, alas, is floating away. The calendar, of course, indicates that we're already firmly into autumn, but often around here, the weather stays warm enough to fool you into believing that the chill will never arrive. The pond, however, tells another story, a truer story. Where there were once legions of dragonflies and water lily flowers, there is now quiet on the wing and nothing white in bloom. The lily pads and the duckweed continue to offer green, but this verdant color is offset by end-times, well, end-of-the-growing-season-times, brown: a sycamore leaf, dried out, devoid of life and ready to sink. It looks bleak, but take heart. The leaf will eventually give up its cache of molecules. They'll become the building blocks of next year's growing season. In the end is the beginning.