I first began to notice the season of stained glass in my old neighborhood, at the other end of the city.
I had always loved the changing colors of fall, but over several decades of nature observation I started to realize that the first shades of new life in the spring were not merely a simple green. If you let your eyes relax a little, you could see a sort of a haze, of yellow, yellow-green, orange or red upon the distant hills. That first wave of spring color was composed not of new leaves, but rather of thousands upon thousands of tiny clusters of the barely visible flowers of the various maples that dominated the area, followed not long after by the unfolding of only scarcely larger leaves, deeply lined like accordion pleating.
But I began to notice something more: as those tender young leaves slowly uncurled and unfolded, I began to see that their tissue-thin texture was so fine that it let the light of morning or evening sun not merely bounce back, but actually pass right through.
It was almost like looking at stained glass, so sheer and translucent that you could almost see right through it, glowing molten-bright in the long, slanting light of the early spring sun.
Even the full glory of autumn color cannot rival this transparency, this lamp-like shining. Cameras cannot do it justice, or at least not at my level of skill. I have tried to capture here the Japanese maple in front of the house next door to mine. It passes so quickly, this season of stained glass. It is already a little too late – even with yet another late leaf-out this year, the leaves are beginning to thicken, and will soon be deepening into dull summer shades of maroon and green. They will not shine again until autumn, while perhaps more noticeably, even if not as brightly.