Today's sky is no brilliant blue but a soggy blanket of dull gray.
Its lofty drabness has acquiesced to the terrestrial, allowing the fall colors of the landscape to explode and bleed upward, outward, into the chill air. A copse of scrub oak adorns a knoll set amidst the newly greening pasture land. Elsewhere, tangles of blackberry bushes appear in numerous ten-foot clumps. Pity the lone tree that lies in the barbed approach of these invading strangler vines.
An ancient apple tree stands aslant a broken fence of peeling, faded white paint. Yellowing leaves shout their riotous hue to the complacent slate above. Its limbs have not been kept clean: smaller branches and the occasional watersprout festoon the lopsided tree with willy-nilly growth. Its saving grace is the ornamentation of golden apples by the peck that cling tenaciously to their place of birth. No one, apparently, has been on hand to harvest the robust sweetness of this delectable, non-irrigated fruit.
This arboreal specimen of Nature gone wild no artist, however skilled, could ever hope to capture successfully on canvas.