Leaf Peeper

Growing up in New England, I was spoiled by fall foliage.  It wasn’t anything special to me.  The summer came to a close, school started, the air got cooler, the leaves changed color.  It just happened and young Annie thought nothing of it.

It wasn’t until I went to highschool in the Pioneer Valley of Western Mass, what I would later learn to be a fall foliage hot bed, that I began to notice the leaves.  Well, not so much the leaves but more so the large groups of older people from all over the place that got bussed in to “leaf peep”.  The leaf peepers would amble through historic Deerfield as I jogged from my dorm down Albany Road, late for soccer practice, laughing to myself and wondering how boring their lives must be to travel here just to admire leaves.

4 years later, the leaf peepers followed me up I-91 North to Hanover, NH for college.  Here, obsessions over foliage were prevalent, yet also had a humorous undertone.  Hiking Guile during peak foliage was a must as was posting pictorial evidence on Instagram (guilty).  The foliage in Hanover was hard to ignore.  It flooded social media feeds, painted the green in color, and echoed a satisfying crunch as you walked around campus.

This year was different, however.  The summer came to a close, school for the first time did not start for me, the air did get a little cooler, but as I worked on finishing the van at our home in Rhode Island, I didn’t see any leaves begin to change color.  You could say that I became “seasonally confused”.  I’m sure others can relate to the time warp sensation I have felt since the beginning of COVID and quarantine madness.  Last time I checked, it was mid-March and since then everything has blurred.  Summer felt endless, and fall?  Were we still going to do that this year?  I found myself missing and yearning for those red, orange, and yellow leaves that used to line the roads and speckled the undulating hills that surrounded me on campus.  

When I first started planning the van build and this journey, I was under the assumption I would be leaving mid to end August.  The build took way longer than I expected.  But, I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and I have now found myself on the ultimate peak foliage leaf peeping tour.  My 16-year-old self would be rolling her eyes in the quintessential Annie fashion and muttering under her breath about how boring my life must be to be so intrigued by leaves.  Maybe I’ve matured, or maybe life these days is truly that boring that I am so easily excited about colorful leaves.

As I looped my way up north through Deerfield, Hanover, Burlington, into the Adirondacks, and then south down through the Catskills, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and, now, as I’m moseying my way through Virginia, I think I finally understand the hype.  I mean, man, the foliage is unbeleafable.  ha ha ha.  But seriously, I could not have timed this better if I had tried.

Besides the beauty of it, there is something so satisfying about this outward manifestation of the passage of time.  While so much of our normal lives feel like they have been put on pause over the course of the last months, the seasons are still changing, time is passing, the world, for now, is still spinning forward.  I don’t know if it is all the foliage and leaf peeping I’ve been doing over the last two weeks, or that I left the bubble I had confined myself to since March, perhaps, a combination of the two, but I feel like I finally escaped the time warp.  I’ve been reminded that there is no pause button, time moves on and the seasons change.  However, instead of standing still and watching the change happen around me, I’m moving with it.  Following the peak foliage as it makes it way down south, chasing the sun, and leaf peeping along the way.