Our Days Are Numbered

10/22/13 Platinum Carbon ink, watercolor, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

Not literally, course. But with every tree I sketch, I keep thinking it may be my last of the season. Who knows when the weather will turn to continual rain as it often does in October; who knows when a windstorm will blow all the leaves off.

In spite my thoughts of gloom and doom, when the day’s fog finally broke around 3 p.m., I dashed out to look for one more tree sketch – and found two. The first was only a block away – a maple growing in another Maple Leaf neighborhood traffic circle. (It’s not bent in the wind – it’s just growing asymmetrically.)

Feeling uplifted, I drove to a street near Green Lake where I often park for my yoga class. I’m usually rushing to get to class, so I don’t have time for a sketch, but I’ve been admiring the yellow and orange trees (cherries, I think) on both sides of the street. Now that I finally made time to sketch them, they were long past their prime. In fact, the tree I focused on was more bare than not. Like I said, their days are numbered.

But with the sun at my back lighting up all that color, it’s hard to be gloomy and doomy.

10/22/13 Platinum Carbon ink, watercolor, Canson XL 140 lb. paper