Kaliningrad in Autumn Leaves it Out

The autumns of our years leaf everything to our imaginations

15 November 2023~ Kaliningrad in Autumn Leaves it Out

You’ve heard the one, ‘Bringing in the sheaves’, but here, in Kaliningrad, at this time of year, it’s more a case of cleaning up the leaves.

I love autumn, it is by far the most favourite season in my romantic calendar. To enjoy it to its utmost and garner from it the utmost joy, you really must locate a tree, or better trees in plural, and cuddle up beneath them. Leaves in autumn (as I wrote in an earlier post) are one of Kaliningrad’s municipal treasures.

Kaliningrad is a green city, haven’t I told you so already. Its tree population is quite prodigious: many streets are lined with them, many gardens full of them, many parks play host to them and the city in itself, in its large and spacious capacity, is endowed with small spinneys and woods, none of which are treeless. In fact, as strange as it may seem, none of Kaliningrad’s woodland is short of a tree or two. I cannot recall a single occasion whilst walking through the wooded areas availed of by the city, when I could not find a tree. Thus, when the time eventually comes, as come around it must, for the leaves to eventually twig-it, they’ll be sure to let you know.

Recently, however, Kaliningrad has entered the phase when it best at worst resembles Britain. In Britain some blame it on ‘global warming’ (they usually look and sound like parrots), others on globalist bullshit (They are quickly labelled conspiracy theorists and sectioned under the Mental Health Act for being too perspicacious.(Hysterical Whitehall laughter!)).

Whatever the explanation, it has all gone damp and soggy when previously it was crisp and dry. All it took in those conditions was a light to moderate breeze and leaves were swirling from the trees like proverbial pennies from heaven. (It’s good that leaves aren’t feminine pink, for when outed by the tree it would be difficult not to compare them to confetti at a gay pride wedding. (“Oooh, now, just listen to him. Who does he think he isn’t!”)

Kaliningrad in autumn

One day these leaves line the trees like a coat of many colours, the next they lay like a carpet, or like Sir Walter Raleigh’s autumnal cloak, thick and deep and predominantly yellow, on lawn, verge, road, cobbles, on pavements where there are some and on pavements where there aren’t.

The affect of this time of month on Kaliningrad’s leafy parts is to transform it into a dense yellow snowstorm, which on closer inspection at ground level reveals a colour composition of varying yellow hues interspersed with auburn, browns and intricate shades of red.

If autumnal colours do something to you, if they reach the parts others cannot, if in the changing fate of leaves you find all that your heart desires and more than you thought you could ever deserve, then Kaliningrad in autumn is the place you should have gone to when you had the chance.

If, on the other hand, the sight of leaves makes you incurably phobic, then your relief will be as keenly felt as my infatuation for the leaf collectors when they hit the streets to engage in their yearly task, which by no means insurmountable is none the less redoubtable, of lifting and shifting piles of leaves before buckets of snow plummet down on top of them, not on them you understand, but on top of the fallen leaves.

Hanging, floating, whirling, twirling, falling and settling autumn leaves possess a poetic beauty but come the damp and the snow, they can overnight turn slippery, ‘mighty slippery’ I might say, but I’d only say it in an Old West accent and when I’m wearing my cowboy suit.

I don’t expect you to go so far, to visualise this scene, a scene like that is nobody’s business, but please do take a moment to gander at the lovely photos of Kaliningrad’s autumn leaves: