THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995               TAG: 9512020002
SECTION: COMMENTARY               PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   53 lines

THE WALLS CAN'T KEEP OUT ALL OF FALL'S GLORY

Robert Frost was right. Nothing gold can stay. But gold of autumn leaves can tarry while going out and can say some long goodbyes. So can scarlet, orange, bronze and brown, plum and pink. So many leaves have stayed up so long this fall that December's here and the woods still flame, and there are rainbows on waters reflecting yellow bushes with pine boughs poking through.

This much richness this late in the year's decline is rare even in the South. Call it compensation for the hot glare of a hard summer. It is, mostly, a delectation.

If sight were sound, one might hear trumpets as daybreak wicks up the light among maples, oaks and hickories, or violins as landscapes gleam in soft afternoons.

Walking, one turns to new paths; driving, he wants the road open on all sides. From an expressway memory leaps to country roads. Sees huge oaks with elbowed limbs at a homeplace where only the chimney stands, and the last apple on an old tree persisting in a shaggy pasture. Crumpled corn fields stretch away - rimmed by colored woods. The sky is a dome of perfect blue touched intermittently by wings.

There's a stillness almost palpable, and a sense of time dripping lazily. But the light fades; a plume of woodsmoke rises and memory makes another catch.

Here's pomace piled where the syrup was cooked; a cup catching the last thick drops from a cider press; a rabbit box with its door hitched up; a cornstalk tepee for storing potatoes; a low-limbed persimmon tree where a possum could be caught while snacking, dropped into a croker sack and taken to folks too old to follow hounds chasing in the woods.

A car horn interrupted this revery: I was back on I-64 West near Northampton Boulevard - glancing toward a cove where water, woods and birds meet, but seeing only the panels of a wall that now gives the road the feeling of a gulch.

For weeks the barrier had stopped just short of the living mural; half-framed, being shut off, the scene was the more magnetic.

Maybe, I'd hoped, they'll leave this little gap, but something there is that does love a wall and so the scene was blanked. That's what started my memory off on country roads which, in the lingo, are ``unimproved.'' How long, I wonder, will one look at a wall because of what it hides? The tops of trees, thank goodness, I can see over the wall - and the leaves shedding as slowly as can be. No water though. And no shimmering rainbows. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

by CNB