I’ve had a long love affair with the maple tree.  It started with the three sugar maples that stood in front of our house in Hastings, Michigan.  One of them was a perfect climbing tree that had a particular limb arrangement that made it possible for me to settle into a neat seat with a fine backrest—and far enough out from the trunk that I could bob up and down gently with just slight swings of my legs.  The second tree directly in front of the house was not friendly to climbers: lowest branches too high for me to reach, and the one time I did reach one, it tossed me off and laid me out flat on my back.  The third one was just too big and tall to do much but offer us abundant fall leaves to rake into piles for leaf tumbling and, best of all, leaf burning.

I still remember vividly looking down our street and seeing several neighbors, garden rakes in hand, tending their leaf fires along with us and turning the air “foggy” with wonderfully fragrant leaf smoke.  I understand why cities now have ordinances against leaf burning, but I still miss that old fall ritual.  Marge and I will sometimes take a fall drive into the country and deliberately slow down and open the windows whenever we find that bluish leaf smoke wafting through the cool air—just to create some nostalgia.

Besides offering tough limbs for climbing, the maples, of course, offered their spring sap for the making of syrup.  The nearby town of Vermontville (fittingly named) was famous for its spring maple syrup festival.

In the fall, the maples’ treat is also aesthetic: the flaming glory of its leaves.  Neighborhoods canopied over with green all summer long suddenly reveal subtleties as the chlorophyll production is cut off by lessening daylight—actually by the increasing amount of darkness.  When the green drains away, it leaves behind other pigments that were there all along.  Then the trees and shrubs show their defining fall apparel: brown oaks, yellow ashes, yellow-orange-red sassafras, golden Norway maples, golden-brown elms, burgundy sumacs—and the brilliant red sugar maples.  Because of the glucose content of the sugar maple, the absence of the chlorophyll plus sunlight and cool nights interacts with the sugar in the leaves to make them their brilliant red.

It’s at this time of the year especially that the allusions of the “tree psalms” most speak to my heart and soul (After people, trees are the most mentioned living things in the Bible).

Consider this merry message from Psalm 96:

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
Let the field exult, and everything in it!

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord.
(vss. 11-12 ESV)

All over the countryside in Michigan, October is the month when the silent song of the trees is most joyous—when we are reminded in spectacular fashion that all created things in their own nature respond to their Maker, making the outdoors a giant cathedral echoing with praise.  In this cathedral we do not worship the creation; we join with all its creatures in “manifold witness” singing together a doxology of praise to our great Creator for His never-ending faithfulness.

[Click on the photos to enlarge them.]

See you outdoors!

Dean