LEAVES

There’s really something special about autumn in this area of New England. The days are warm with beautiful leaves, or frosty with beautiful leaves, or rainy, kind of like a French Impressionist painting of Paris at the turn of the century…this with all the beautiful leaves falling to the ground, but still vivid and lovely.

I have a good friend, a displaced New Yorker who is a wonderful poet. Every year he tries to determine exactly when the perfect pitch of the leaves will lure him to Vermont. Sometime in early October he gets into his car with a friend and heads for the mountains, invariably in a traffic jam of other leaf peepers, always wondering if this is the best spot for optimal leaf viewing. He’s written poems about this. One has been set as a song, so his experience is truly immortalized.

I just wait. In Cambridge, or Gloucester where we have a house near the ocean, the gold and red and brilliant yellows come later, but the days of all that glowing light do come eventually. When it’s time, for the week or so that it’s most lovely, I walk, and look, and kick up leaves.
This week I went to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is a couple of miles from our house. I had never been there in the autumn before, I tend to go in the spring when the azaleas or rhododendrons are blooming, and I hadn’t been there at all for a couple of years. The first day I went with a friend who didn’t walk far enough or fast enough for me, but the next day I went alone feeling really tired and out-of-sorts. I walked along with my camera, which got to be very leisurely because I kept stopping to take pictures. I only got a few really good shots, but the whole place was breathtaking. I came home refreshed and ready to take on anything. I went yesterday with my granddaughter and she took pictures with a camera which has film which needs to be developed. I hope she’ll get them back soon, she’s a great photographer.




One of the many reasons I love the autumn is the colors, the light. I use these elements a lot in my decorating. Our front hallway is a wonderful saturated autumn yellow color, with russet carpets and a dark mirrored armoire and paintings on the wall. The upper part of our bedroom and our library is a red color which we have named after our street….it has to be mixed up each time. It’s the color of old books, and autumn leaves. My kitchen is green and cream and wood, and in the autumn there are bouquets of mums and tablecloths with russet and green, with brass candlesticks which we light when we eat at night.

None of this is hard or expensive to do. Many years ago I lived in New York City, and I had a friend who was as impoverished a musician as I was. He had (and still has) an apartment on the corner of West 70something Street and Broadway. It’s one large room, with a kitchen and bath and fantastic large windows overlooking Broadway. In those days of rent-controlled apartments, it was possible to have such a place. It was also a high-crime area then, with a lot of break-ins. In my own apartment not far away, which I shared with another mezzo-soprano, we had figured out all the places where the burglars hadn’t looked and we hid things there when we were both away on tour. We had jokes about “New York Decorating: Macramé Your Police Lock, Arrange Ferns on Your Window Bars”, perhaps for New York Magazine. I threatened to put up signs on our fire escape in several languages asking whoever broke in to put the houseplants back inside in the winter and close the window. My friend, however had the ultimate burglar-proof apartment, and it was gorgeous. In his large room, was a huge, old oriental rug which he had found in the rubbish and had gotten cleaned. On it was his old and large Steinway piano (a necessity as he was a pianist) and chained to it was the TV, on the floor, and covered with some nice material when he wasn’t looking at it. He painted the walls an autumnal red. He recovered several large floor cushions in autumn colors and had lovely drapes, which he made. His bed was a platform in an alcove, with an Indian bedspread on it in bright colors with lots of cushions, a couple of lamps…and that was it. It was totally stunning. I haven’t seen him for years, and I wonder if now that the neighborhood is upscale, if anything has changed.

Someone showed me what to do with leaves if you want to preserve them for an arrangement. Go to the pharmacy and ask for glycerin….about a cup should do it. Put the colored branches (yellow beech works particularly well) on to a surface you can bang on, get a hammer and smash the stems. Arrange them in a container with the glycerin. That’s it. The stems and the leaves will become like suede and keep their color for several months.
Then go and heat up some cider with cloves and cinnamon in it drink it and look at your handiwork. This is particularly satisfying if you’ve been outside kicking up some leaves. Wherever you are, if you’re in a region with actual seasons, there are some, and you can find them easily, and it costs you nothing. My Hot Tips for living in a recession….or any other time.