Writers, philosophers, lunatics and drunks have at least one thing in common, they  ponder the world while most people are too busy living in it to think that much about it. I have long wondered why people are so mesmerized by leaves changing colors as they die. Up where I live, the roads are already clogged with visitors – people here call them “peepers” – who travel great distances to drive slowly along roads and watch leaves die in colorful glory.

In the next few weeks there will be thousands more and we scheduled our Fall 2014 Open House on Columbus Day Weekend because so many people are planning to come here anyway. This year I think I’ve figured out why leaves strike so deep a chord in people. I think that just like life, you can look at leaves in autumn two days: a dead end, the end of something, or rebirth and renewal, the beginning of something.

Fall is either the end of summer, the end of color and warmth, or the beginning of something, the dawning of the winter, the cold, the gathering time. We learn here to drive slowly this time of year, if you go fast you could well plow into people from all over the country driving slowly to take photos of shedding trees and gawk at them. People are so bereft of nature and light that they are willing to drive far and spend a lot of money just to look at it, and this makes me feel good about living here. It is always strange to see people standing alongside their cars taking videos of leaves falling, I always wonder at it.

I have always seen Fall as the beginning of something, a new year, the arrival of winter. Winter for me is a time of less pressure, when I was a kid they were always trying to make me play baseball or run around and slam into other kid’s playing football. I hated it, in the cold I could retreat alone into my room and read and write and hang out with my tanks of tropical fish, I was as strange a boy as I am a man. Even Maria pushes me into doing stuff – walks, nature hikes, tubing on the river, swimming and wading. In the winter, nobody bothers me, I can retreat into my writing cave, light my candles, make my stories and poems.

I love being in nature, even if I am not so good at conquering it.  Nature touches something in us, we need it, we are broken when we are so separate from it, I have seen the healing power of the natural world and of a life with animals, I believe they both have saved me and inspired me, as a writer and as a human being. From the minute I arrived in upstate New York I began writing, and I have never stopped.

As a photographer, my sense of the seasons stops, winter will challenge me, so much of the light and color is gone. Still, I know that winter is my time. I gather myself, it is a spiritual time. Reading before a wood stove, dogs curled up around me, the beauty of the winter pasture, the awful beauty of big storms, being holed up working on my books, challenging myself to find photos that touch the heart and light up the soul. We have our wood, our hay, our oil in the burner. Bring it on.

Like philosophers and lunatics and many drunks I have met, I have decided that there are no dead ends, really.  Leaves, like dogs, are what we need them to be. Life and death are the same thing, so are beginnings and ends. Every end is a beginning, one can’t exist without the other. In meantime, I am out peeping, on the road hunting for dying leaves. For me, leaves are metaphors for the great drama of life – change, change, change. Life compressed happens to leaves, every minute, every day. A living video of our story.

Yesterday I pulled my car over at a riotously beautiful and a van full of peepers pulled over, hopped out with their tripods and point-and-shoots and asked me about my camera, people always notice it, it is big and heavy and black.  Red ran over to them wagging his tail and one of the people exclaimed, “look a red Springer Spaniel!”

No, I said he’s a border collie.

“No,” she said, “border collies don’t look like that. I used to have one.”

“Oh, I said, “you must be right. I guess he is a Springer Spaniel.” She nodded knowingly. I have learned when to argue – never, and when to go along, much too late in life I concede.

“Where do you live?,” asked the man, I think it was her poor husband.

“Right down the road,” I said.

“How come you have to come out and take photos, you must have trees in your own back yard?” one asked.

“I do,” I said, “but I’ve learned somethings. I used to avoid taking photos of leaves because everybody else was taking them. Then, when I thought about it, I realized it’s a good thing to take photos of things everybody else is taking photos of. There must be something do it.”

The man laughed and clapped his hands. “That’s good,” he said, “that’s good.”

“Springers are smart,” said his wife, smugly.

“Yes,” I said, “he is, and you should see him herd sheep!”

She was looking at me curiously, but I was already heading for the car.