During the 6 month sabbatical I spent in Spencer, Massachusetts between September 2002 and March 2003, I experienced the most beautiful scenery you can expect from the Northeast. The maple trees were all turning their foliage into all kinds of bright colors, from green to brown, yellow, orange and red, as you can see from these few photos I took back then. These were before the digital cameras came around, and so the quality is not the very best, but beautiful nonetheless. The property of the Trappist monks of Spencer, St Joseph’s Abbey spread over a mile by another mile, maybe even more, and the spectacular maple trees, right on time, by mid-October, they turn the whole monastery on fire with one row after another, and tree after tree lining up the roads that lead to the main Abbey and Monastery Chapel.
However, that means that the zillion leaves had to be swept up and baggaged, and that was one of my duties with a few other monks and lay-brothers. Thankfully they also had a truck that would suck up the leaves after we piled them up. Then everything will turn into mulch and used as fertilizers and also for their heating system, a contraption they devised to heat the entire monastery.
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