My mother’s house was on a street overhung with huge maples, oaks, and other fall foliage superstars. Everyone had such a thick carpet of leaves to deal with in the fall that they got raked to the curb and the town came along to sweep them up and carry them away to some gigantic municipal compost pile. Here in Rochester, my mother’s new home has some of that same autumn beauty. On a recent visit, I spotted the sedate striped shadows of some denuded trees stretching over the flamboyant fallen leaves on the bank of a pond. Click here for a more distant view of the same scene. Click here for another scene of the beautiful trees she can enjoy in October, right around her birthday.