Everything is wet, soaked through.  Leaves are beginning to come down.  The floor of the tree house is covered with them.  When I climb, I find fallen leaves clinging wetly to branches.  They are tiny, a lot of them, almost miniature, just an inch across, or two.  It had seemed to me that the leaves on the tree were smaller this summer than last.  I had wondered if the drought had shrunk them, if when they had needed to be replete with water the tree had been thirsty and unable to siphon enough through to them.  Next summer I will know to compare.

But they are beautiful, these tiny leaves, golden-yellow, spotted with brown, collecting droplets of rain on their veined surfaces.  The mosses along the branches are vibrantly green from days of rain, the branches themselves are dark against the carpet of yellow foliage beginning to gather on the lawn beneath.  I perch on slippery branches, do my best to shelter the camera from a downpour, and take pictures.