Detail Diary, Vol #3

Autumn at last, starlings, acorns

October 8 - October 21, 2023

Dear friend,

I’m pleased to share with you another fortnight of noticing. Featuring a trip to the Lyon zoo, birds in trees and sky, the blessed arrival of autumn, and a few really excellent collaborations between clouds and sunlight. The sweetgum tree outside my office window is featured twice, it’s so photogenic in its autumn rainbow and sunglow.

Email readers: this post is best viewed in the browser, which will show you more of the photos (most of them have more than one). You should have an option to view in browser, or simply click on the title. Either way, don’t forget that you can click on the embedded Notes to view them on the webpage or app.

#38, full text (and if you’re still in your email and want to see all six photos of autumn goodness…click on the Note!)

A magpie with beak full of round brown acorn—or, a whole tree in the mouth of a magpie. Later, among all the empty acorn caps under the oak, I find a single acorn, and this one, too, scuffed by creaturely teeth.

Today the air has, at last, turned. It's purebred autumn, sweet with leaf spice and crisp grace.

There's a warm invitation from within the arboretum: gentle candle red, quiet over a carpet of needles and chesnut leaves all the same precise shade of rust.

And farther in, find the tall yellow-green grove, presided over by the plane tree, blessed by a red squirrel and the last amber shimmers of sun, fadingly intimate, chapel of dusk.

Why does autumn feel like a physiological need met, at least for a temperate-born-and-bred like me? Is it just the lift of too-long summer, the easing back of saturation, the simple pleasure of contrast honed by enough months of forgetting? Is this my clockwork winding? Or is there something inherently healthy about this precise temperature and snap? Like spring, autumn is transition by definition, and yet on some days it feels like what we were made for. Even the benevolence of early summer seems undefined in comparison. But maybe I'll change my mind again at the next inflection point.

Thanks for coming along! As always, I’d love to hear about your daily details.