Seeing Green Trees In Autumn

WHAT WITH TRUMP dropping bombs on boats and tearing down the White House and all, its kind of nice to get away, if only briefly. When they offered the annual "Fall Foliage" tour at the senior center, I signed up,and hopped on board the minivan with nine other old people.(I'm seventy). It was an uncomfortable ride of a little more than an hour through nice wooded areas and farmland... Our bus is a bit old, and not comfortable. We had lunch out, and it was overall a nice time. But the trees did not cooperate. They were the wrong color, green. When this activity was planned,weeks agao, deciding to do it in late October seemed safe and reasonable, but it turned out to be unreasonable. The trees had not even begun to change color, and October is nearly over.It would be not a fall foliage tour, but only another summer drive... I think we've had this happen several times: scheduling the anual fall foliage tour too early, before the fall colors emerge. I also seem to remember a time or two taking it too late, when the leaves had mostly fallen and the colors had faded. Maybe its best not to even bother to schedule this activity,but rather, to do it on teh spur of the moment, at the perfect time.Octoberis the example of cliamte change that I use most often when I talk about climate change,which is constantly.Its among my favorite topics of converstaion, and since its easy to start a conversation with anybody about the weather, I can conveniently segue to climate change, which differentpeople react to differently. This year, right now, so far, October has been more o a summer month than a fall month where I live, with daily temperatures in the mid eighties most days. Its been like that for peraps twenty years or more. People my age can easily remember when October was a cold weather month in mid America, and Halloween was always frigid cold. As we rode along thorugh the country side, chattering, I kpet looking as the green trees, and noticed that some of the were indeed just barely beginning to change color, on October 23. It almost seems as if they are starting to change later, and later each year. These days the paek color of the fall leaves tends to take place in the middle of November in my neck of the woods; fomrely the tress started changing in mid to late September, and peaked in darly october. As always, I remarked about this to the folks I was riding with, and since they were all at least eighty years old, they all were indeed aware that the climate has changed. I'm not sure they fully understand the difference between "climate" and "weather", but they knew, and know, that it is different now. When I talk about the seasons and the treees being different now, what I mean, what I inted to say is, we have a real problem, this is a disaster, a planetary, global catastrophe, happening now, all around us. That's what I intend to convey, but I'm not always sure I succeeded, perhaps because I don't jump up and down, pound my fists, and shout obscenities when I say it,but rather,I make a few factual scientific comments, calmly. Maybe I should throw in more drama, for emphasis. Many people, even old people who can see the drastic change in climate, don't seem to fully appreciate or "get" the sheer urgency of the situation. Its happening now, fast,and its frightening. When I tell an eighty year old that she might live to see a summer of constant one hundred degree heat, I usually get a bit of an alarmed response, as well I should. But for the most part, when I look around, I see a whole lot of complacency about our impending disaster. Tempting though that sort of response to reality can be, it'll take a lot more than that to actually save ourselves. disaster.