Every place has its moment: April in Paris; Quebec when the snow falls and the maple sap flows; Georgia when you happen to be aboard a train, at midnight.
Ours, it can be argued, is now: when there is still the last heat of summer in the air, and before the eternal darkness of winter begins.
But most of all when the great show, the fall colors, explode to life.
These photographs from the ground and the sky taken by the Chronicle Herald’s Tim Krochak capture the magic that occurs in autumn when it starts to get cold and some trees stop making chlorophyll, allowing hardwood leaves to, essentially, show their true colors.
Then, from the air, the landscape becomes a blanket of burnished yellow, orange and red. From that height, looking at this province becomes like staring into a roaring wood fire.
There are good reasons why, before the pandemic, people came from far away to see Nova Scotia at this time of the year.
Seeing those painterly colors on such a huge scale takes the breath away. For it to happen naturally, for all those shades to come together in such an arresting way, is enough to make a person who has never ventured into a church, temple or mosque believe in a greater power.
It is more just the beauty of the scene, as lovely as it is. There is nothing airy and light about the colors before us. They are deep and earthy, and seem to conjure emotions with similar heft.
There is, after all, something comforting, particularly at this moment in time, about being reminded that change is inevitable. The fleeting, ephemeral nature of the life of a leaf one moment green, the next orange or red — finally a dead thing on the forest floor — reminds us that everything eventually ends, only to be reborn with fresh possibilities all over again.
