Best leaves of all – outside our front door. 24 years ago I had the astonishing, unforgettable good fortune to find myself on a bus from Manhattan to Ithaca, where I was about to begin teaching at Cornell, in the midst of the finest fall-leaf display in recorded history. I had brought a book to read, but for four hours never managed once to take my eyes away from the window, where an illuminated manuscript formed by hill after hill of burning colors created a narrative so vivid – and so suspenseful: was it possible there was another painted hillside to match or top the previous one? – that it resembled the ultimate firework display, one staged by nature herself, thanks to an unsurpassable sequence of weather conditions.
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