This fall, like the last, the pine is losing a large amount of its needles. Yet it remains green at the top and at the tips. It’s a gradual process; the needles turn yellow before they drop. This might well be some ordinary housekeeping, because the tree looked good all summer. I think I recall reading somewhere that pines hang onto their new needles for three or more years. Maybe I’ll look into it. But if the tree is suffering some sort of illness, I doubt there’s anything I can, or should, do about it. Maybe this is exactly what it needs for it to become stronger, nature having its own inscrutable means and ends. Or, it could be that it’s had enough of suburban living, and of breathing the exhaust of delivery vehicles.
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Back from a windy, late-morning walk between rains, with this thought: In terms of efficiency, there must be better ways than writing to lose one’s mind. But who am I to say so?
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Read the fifty-ninth and sixtieth chapters of Middlemarch.
October 16, 2023.
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[ 1899 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Environment, Fall, George Eliot, Insanity, Journals, Middlemarch, Nature, Pines, Rain, Reading, Walking, Wind, Writing
William Michaelian 