What do you mean by a six-step process for a leaf peeper?

Most of you, if you’ve been to my blog before, may have heard me say, “Fall foliage in New England is a continuum” or “It’s an ongoing process” and you may be wondering about the six steps for leaf peepers.

Let me explain, I think there are 6 steps to the fall foilage process. We start at Anticipation and end a month (or two) later with Acceptance. As I’m writing this, I’m currently experiencing extreme denial (this is step five) which occurs at the tail end of the fall foliage season.

The following steps occur at different times for different people. They can even overlap or regress to an earlier stage and combine two steps into one. See if any of the following apply to you during your fall foliage travels.

1-Anticipation

Anticipation is key. It usually sets in mid-August when leaves display early signs of color change. It could be shallow-rooted birch or swamp maple with roots below water level. When a single leaf or branch turns red, I check the tree for health.

All of a sudden everybody starts thinking about what’s to come. The comments and questions start flooding in, Should I be thinking about changing reservations because of an “early fall”? 🙂

I anticipate autumn colors every year, starting in April. I check climate predictions for September and October, along with spring and summer temperatures, snowfall, and insect activity. All of these factors contribute to the beautiful autumn colors.

Once August/September arrives, I find myself moving into the second step in the process.

2-Color Awareness (or alertness, or panic)

For lack of a better term, I’m calling this second step color awareness. I tend to go into a heightened state of alertness whenever I’m out of the house starting in August. I’ll be driving down the road and I might see a bit of red color which might only be a child’s toy or a business sign peeking through the green foliage.

This heightened state usually leads to a sub-step that I call – neck pain! this sub-step is caused by my head whipping to one side or the other as I catch a bit of color in my peripheral vision. It doesn’t usually cause the third step until later in September or early October, depending on where I’m driving at the time.

3-Brake Test

As you can guess with this third step I and 1 million other leaf peepers need to have bumper stickers that state “Beware! I brake for fall foliage“. This is not for your amusement but meant as a serious warning to the locals who are tailgating us. (Note* You should ALWAYS pull over and let them by)

This is our attempt to warn them to back off or even go around us because sooner or later a leaf peeper will see a sugar maple (insert your favorite tree here) and slam their foot so hard on the break that the rear end of the car will leap into the air. If the tailgating offender isn’t careful they will neatly slide to a stop underneath the leaf peeper’s bumper.

4-Incomprehensible Joy

This step varies for almost every person I talk to. For some, just seeing a branch with red, orange, and yellow leaves (or some variation thereof) will cause their heart to flutter and a feeling of incomprehensible joy will wash over them.

For the more jaded of us (like myself), it isn’t until I’m sitting in a location where everywhere I turn, all I can see are trees of various hues of red, orange, and gold (with green as a counterpoint). At this point, I will usually succumb to the same heart flutter and the simple joy known only to children on Christmas day. (pick your holiday of choice)

I won’t say it takes peak fall foliage for me to feel this way. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a tough day not finding any fall foliage to blog about or photograph when I suddenly come upon an incredibly Red Maple. A maple that’s so red, against an impossibly blue sky that it takes my breath away. Moments like these, bring such joy, that I honestly can’t describe the feeling. (But I’ll keep trying)

As we move into late October I start moving into the next step…

5-Disbelief and Denial

Denial[-noun] is refusal to recognize or acknowledge, disbelief in facing the reality of a fact.

For me, denial takes a while to set in since I live near the seacoast and the color is late to arrive here, and even later to leave. It’s usually November when I start to come to terms with my denial.

I will usually tell all of you to “Enjoy what you found” because it’s a continuum and it won’t last. When it comes right down to it, I’m just like you. There are days when I wish the joy of finding all this beautiful color would continue, but I know it can’t.

This is when disbelief and denial slap me in the face… The realization that my words are coming back to haunt me. It forces me to accept or at least acknowledge that the season is fading and soon I’ll be at the final step…

6-Acceptance

The only way I can survive my denial is by realizing that I’ve taken a lot of beautiful images that I now have to go through and catalog. Yankee Magazine did an article on me a few years back saying “Jeff foliage memorializes fall one leaf at a time”. It’s in this way that I deal with the sadness and denial and with the knowledge that in a little over 300 days it will return around the first day of autumn next year.

All the images in today’s blog article were taken during the 2012 season and the ones dated 14 November were taken with my cell phone during my morning walk,  so my denial isn’t quite over yet!

Jeff Foliage Folger

Autumn is a state of mind more than a time of year – Jeff Foliage

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