"...but the overall trend is obvious."

"Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,

and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt..."

William Allingham

Wind whipping up white-caps on the Columbia.

Obstinate trees do what they can to hold on to their leaves.

...but the overall trend is obvious.

Like a universe of stars rushing to universal heat death, leaves twinkle in the wind, blown away in chaos and disorder.

I walk the banks of the Sandy river and capture a subset of a beautiful exodus.

Leaves carried away in the current of a rain swollen river.

Stems like bones, join rotting salmon in rich silt deposits, perhaps to become fossils...perhaps to see the sun again in some future epoch.

Leaves performing one last dance ...

...in the water of life...

...in dappled fractured light of a waning sun...

...beaten against the rocks...

...to sink, to decompose, to cease to be a leaf