It 's quite beyond fanciful of course, but it's as though nature, sensitive to her creatures' dismay with the autumn changes taking place in preparation for winter's introduction, has devised a plan to make us feel somehow better about that transition, with her generous gift of visual pleasure in fall foliage. In the spring there is no need to placate the feelings of sensate creatures.

After all in the spring, though with winter receding,there is anticipation of a felicitous kind. Though the landscape looks ravaged; dark and bleak looking there the exciting advent of new green buds appearing everywhere. In the spring, we feel the excitement of anticipation of the renewal of life. Each passing day brings a new change in the landscape making its way from sere dark greys to emerging emeralds of new life springing out of the soil that has finally shed frost.

But in the fall, there are dreary thoughts of the end of green splendour, and the oncoming cold accompanied by ferocious winds, snowstorms, sleet and inclement conditions we must struggle with. Of course there's the enchanting beauty of winter days, the sun glancing off coverlets of newfallen snow, trees frosted with layers of sparkling ice or cushioned with snow.

The utterly exquisite aesthetic of such landscapes bedazzles and amazes. No matter how often throughout our lives we see those scenes of winter's domination and its capacity to decorate the world we are surprised anew and captivated by the sights. Our pleasure in the natural environment more than balances out our hesitation to praise winter because of atmospheric conditions making us miserable with cold and trepidatious over storms.

Now, when we trundle ourselves through the forest trails, following light-footed Jackie and Jillie we observe the vacating of foliage from their perches on the forest deciduous trees, and the thickness of the colourful carpet of leaves laid down by the wind. We watch as leaves, under the impetus of the breezes spiral and cascade down from branches to ground. We admire the kaleidoscope of confetti-like hues of orange, gold, green and pink with the occasional scarlet creating a brilliant patchwork of nature's devising.

We miss, truth to tell, the daily adventure of recognizing new seasonal vegetation thrusting out of the richness of the forest's leafmass. Their day had come and pleasured us, and now it's gone, for another year. Another year. We can hardly credit that another year has gone by. That we've been through all the seasons that make up a year. But we have.