New England has its maples. We have our aspens, birches, and especially our tamaracks. Tamarack (Larix laricina) is conifer whose needles turn orange in the autumn and fall off the tree. There is a stand of them on the northwest border of our property, and when the sunrise moves south in the fall it illuminates them like 60-foot-tall light bulbs. Scattered as they are among other conifers, in the fall they make for a truly awesome spectacle: miles and miles of dense green flecked with gold along the flanks of the mountains, in the horizontal light of fall, with the blue shadows of clouds slowly ascending to the peaks, and the mist curling up from the canyons. It looks as soft as the softest fur. It’s a thrilling sight, one I never tire of.

Anyway, here’s our patch of tamarack as seen looking north out the front window. (Our house faces northeast.) You can see the roof of the shoop at center left, and Jacob is standing on the sofa in the lower left. Until some clown invents a CCD as sensitive as the human retina, no camera can capture both an electric display of autumn foliage and a kid in the darkened foreground.