Fall is surely my favorite season for Vineyard walking. The golds in the woods are gleaming, the reds are extravagantly bold, the huckleberry bushes and cranberry bogs are crimson, sassafras mittens are russet. Poison ivy is at its shimmering best and sumac, if one finds it, is a deep, rich red. The evergreen holly trees are showing off their finery that never fades.

In summer, the stone walls’ stalwart grayness is camouflaged by lichens and often hidden by abundant, over-hanging foliage. But now, stone walls are at their best, clearly marking the up-Island fields they have edged for centuries. I have been noticing as I pass them not only the careful way that the biggest stones have been laid to edge a field, but the way the smaller stones at the top are piled, too. Brown fallen leaves, of course, crunch underfoot these crisp fall days. That sound is only surpassed for a walker by the squeak beneath boots of a new-fallen snow.

I have been walking by Glimmerglass Pond in West Tisbury mornings this month. There is still a great island of water lily leaves on the pond, though, of course, the lilies themselves are gone. Most flowers are past, although purple wild asters add their touches of color along paths and roadsides, and the pink roses inside the West Tisbury Congregational Church fence and in Edgartown dooryards are a temptation for passersby to pick. But fall is the gala season for trees rather than flowers.

At mid-morning last Saturday I was on Barnes road in Oak Bluffs. For a time, I lived on the Lagoon that Barnes Road edges. But I lived in the Oklahoma section on its Vineyard Haven side. Whenever I pass the Water Works on Barnes Road, I am tempted to park and cross the causeway and walk along the shore to where I used to live. I like to see the trees that grow along the beach, for many are old friends. Sometimes the water laps at them. At high tide, it takes dexterous climbing to get around them while keeping my feet dry, but the tide was very low as I began my walk. It was a sunny afternoon, and, to my delight, I was seeing not two, but four red maples just beyond the Water Works gate. Two were the real thing, of course. The other two were the maples’ reflections in the pond.

As I walked the Lagoon beach, I saw that my old tree friends were still there. I found a whelk nestled beneath one. In the past, I often found scallop shells and horseshoe crabs. I climbed over docks and passed blue and green kayaks pulled up on shore. A hammock was strung between trees. Beach grasses had been blown flat by a wind. Had I wanted rockweed for my garden, it was on the shore in abundance. There were few boats in the water, only their white moorings remained.

I saw that a new house was being built and an old one remodeled close to the beach. The house that my husband and I had built and lived in for seven years is long gone, replaced by something far grander. Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University, has sometimes been its summer occupant.

I have known Oklahoma all my life. On the site of our house that is now gone, we would have family cookouts when I was child. And we would have afternoon swims across the Lagoon. In those days, there were only a handful of houses in the Oklahoma development. Where houses are now, there was an abundance of blueberry and huckleberry bushes, and each summer a friend and I would pick them and sell them to the cooks at the Wesley House and the Ocean View in Oak Bluffs. They usually would buy the blueberries from us, for our price was cheap, and I think they liked young girl entrepreneurs. They tended to turn down the huckleberries as too seedy. Though then and now I have always found them the more flavorful of the two berries.

With no blueberries to pick at this time of year, I gathered a handful of wild asters, a tendril of bittersweet and something white and fluffy that was brightening a tree along the shore. I brought them back to West Tisbury for an autumn bouquet.

The wind had come up as I was walking and the phragmites were tossing insolently in the wind along the causeway. I know there are too many of them and that they are taking over our ponds, but I like them in dried flower bouquets. They go well with cattails and bittersweet. (Bittersweet, I know, is also invasive.)

Each year, I try to get to the causeway to gather cattails before the flowers burst out of their brown cylinders, but I never get there in time. This would have been a good year, for there was a forest of burst cattails on the Water Works side of the causeway.

I took a last look at the two crimson maples and their reflections before I climbed back into my car to return to West Tisbury. Everywhere I looked, nature was putting on the best of her annual Island shows.

— Phyllis Meras