November's Garden: Quick Peeks at a Fading Grandeur

Sunset comes so early it's gone before I remember to look at it.

On the way to the golf course there's a tiny pond just big enough for a quartet of ducks to spin around one another in circles. Go a couple hundred feet farther and the city skyline rises up above the November treeline.

Back home, the Japanese 'red' maple delivers on its promise.

The sun slips away again, its patented standard time disappearing act, not bothering to tint a cloudless sky.

The Spartina grass in the salt marsh across the road from the harbor gilds in the light of a low-angled sun.

The leaves on the weeping cherry tree do their disappearing act, by stages. Some pale yellow, some bronze. Nabokov said there are a hundred shades of yellow. He must have been thinking of autumn.

The last of the perennials, the spotted toad lilies, maked a belated appearance. Autumn, we hardly knew ye.