Fast Fading Fall

This post is short on words and shows off the fall colors viewed on recent walks in Mine Falls Park, a 325-acre park in Nashua, NH, that's close to the mill apartments. It is bordered on the North by the Nashua River and the south by the Mill Pond canal system. These images were taken on both canal and river sides of our walk. (None are AI generated.)

Photos were taken 2+ weeks ago, when there was still fall color in the park. Due to some recent windy days, most of the leaves are on the paths now.

Even when a tree is bare, it's still a beautiful sight as attested to by a poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, like ourselves, a NJ native. Kilmer (1886-1918) was also a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. The fourth and youngest child in his family, he was named after two priests at Christ Church in New Brunswick, NJ: the curate, Alfred R. Taylor, and the rector, the Rev. Dr. Elisha Brooks Joyce. (Kilmer's father, Dr. Frederick Barnett Kilmer, a physician and analytical chemist, who worked for the NJ-based Johnson and Johnson Company, is credited as inventing the company's famous baby powder.) 

Joyce Kilmer (1908)

Joyce Kilmer taught Latin in Morristown, NJ, and wrote for The New York Times  and defined words for the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary. In 12917, shortly after the U.S. entered WW I in 1917, Kilmer enlisted in the New York National Guard. At the time of his deployment to Europe, he was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation. He was deployed to France with the 69th Infantry Regiment (the famous Fighting 69th). Tragically, he died at the age of 31, killed by a sniper's bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Kilmer is famously remembered for a 1913 short poem, titled Trees first published in the August 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.