Autumn’s march of days

The fall colors have been beautiful this year, though there were clear stages to everything. On October 20, I took a picture with my cell phone of the children’s park near my house – the Japanese maples looked great.

When I went back a week later to take a better picture with my camera, they were almost completely bare, while other maples were in their prime. The ginkgo trees, however, were still a little bit green.


SY and I went to Seoul Children’s Park on the 31st, and I took this picture.

By November 10, the ginkgo trees had turned fully golden and looked great. Their leaves would fall in even the slightest wind, which made for some spectacular sites. People picked and roasted their cherry-tomato-sized fruit, while persimmon trees overloaded with fruit. I only wish I had the time to visit a park to take more pictures.


Then, a little more than a week later, on November 19, we got our first snow. Of course, it didn’t last for more than a day or so, but it was enough to persuade all the ginkgos to drop all their remaining leaves posthaste. The persimmon trees, too, relieved themselves of their foliage in surprising fashion, dropping all of their leaves even though they hadn’t even changed color. In the span of two or three days, everything was gone.

And that, by everyone’s reckoning, was the end of autumn.