Sometimes 'camouflaged as summer'

In New Hampshire's White Mountains.

Photo by Someone35

"A New England fall has the sort of reality summer will never have. Summer is an idyll; lush, throbbing, lazy, it delivers promises and fantasies spun in February. Fall puts an end to the dreaming; But while it is an end, it is also a beginning. Things start up once more. You regather and regroup.

"As for Nature in fall, she's in a tricky mood. The fields pulsate yet with the sound of cricket and cicada. The trees are round and full as they were in mid-July; the ponds lie there misty, warm, seductive. One day camouflaged as summer, fall can easily toss of this disguise and appear as a prophet: cold, wet, angry. ''

-- By the novelist Anne Bernays, from her introduction to the "Fall'' chapter of New England: The Four Seasons, by Arthur Griffin.