Scenic parcels

The bus pauses by the monument most mornings, it's a meeting of many roads where traffic bunches briefly as it flows into Boston proper. The grounds of the town hall opposite contains a number of broad maples. The light only falls on them for part of the day and so the leaves are not fully reddened yet. As a breeze lifts the branches, ripples of pale green wash through the burgeoning crimson. Hidden mint in secretive scarlet. When the light passes through these leaves they turn the colour of toffee apples, glossy bright sugar windows, red yellow green bronze.

A piece of tall rusting wire fence carries a climbing vine. It has crept over the top and some tendrils are venturing over onto a power line and then to the pavement below. One has dropped far below its companions to the height of my shoulder. It bounces gently, the tips have caught a broken tree branch before it could dash itself onto the ground. It seems a kindly thing to have done.

The leaves of the oak trees here are far larger than the British oak. They are longer and their lobes squarer. Many of these trees line the route I walk to the bus stop. I can reach up and touch the lower branches to greet them every day. One branch hangs just barely above my head. When I walk beneath it I briefly wear a leafy coronet, my daily inauguration - noone has told me what for.

Breakfast on the front veranda with marmite-on-toast and a cup of tea, the strong morning light fills the spaces in the forest across the road. The sun at my left makes bright hazy ladders to the ground in the misty air between the trees. The trunks are dark chocolate and the canopy a vibrant lime. In the clearing nearest to me I can just make out squirrels scurrying between golden pools and the quick flash of birds disappearing into cool mystery. When I get back from work I grab a cold beer and sit on the veranda to watch the light die. Now the beams enter the woodland directly. I realize there is an extra room in the forest, a smaller clearing beyond the first revealed by the heavy red sun. The tree trunks are painted bright pink and the leaves are dark. The gloaming sets in, turning the trees grey and the sky indigo. My bottle is empty.