An autumn to remember

According to Environment Canada, temperatures will remain in the teens until at least mid-week.  Although the nights have been very cool, the harvest moon has hung silver in a clear sky.  The air has seemed so luminous that I almost expect the northern lights to appear.  It reminds me of northern Alberta.  Most mornings have broken sunny.  Light jacket weather.  This afternoon, Sue, Anne and I sat on the front step, soaking up the sun.  A light breeze stirred the trees, coaxing down the last gold and yellow leaves, and scattering maple keys across the yard.

The fine weather has provided some unexpected chances to enjoy the outdoors.  Last weekend, members of the Co-op turned out for our annual fall clean-up and potluck lunch.  By noon, a satisfying row of stuffed leaf-bags lined the sidewalk between our house and the next.  With just a little sadness, I moved the canoe to a new perch on top of the north side shed, where it will remain until next spring.

The following day, I spent a few hours in Gatineau Park, looking for late-season ferns and fungi.  I concentrated specifically on a hillock adjacent to the lower parkway, where a tortured rock-cut had long tempted me.  Outside the city, autumn seemed more advanced, with almost all of the trees down to their bare limbs.  A hard frost the previous couple of nights had done for most of the mushrooms, and a thick carpet of leaves covered the forest floor.  But I still found a few ferns and herbs peeking through, especially on the steep cliffs of the hillock -- including my favourite, the delicate maidenhair spleenwort.  Mostly though, I marvelled at the topography and geology, imagining the pressure and the heat that had created and contorted the bedrock underfoot -- hard Canadian Shield -- and then the forces that had split and splintered, that had scraped it clean.  One particular image caught my imagination:  the sporangia of a common polypody fern framed against the backdrop of fractured, cedar-shadowed cliff.  It seemed to me that all power of the premordial earth had acted just to create a welcoming place for that one, small expression of life.