The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows.

October 13. 

The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. The bass is bare. A thick carpet of white pine needles lies now lightly, half an inch or more in thickness, above the dark-reddish ones of last year. Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 13, 1855



The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. See October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground."); October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”); October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. ”);  October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods.")

Carpet of white pine needles... See October 13, 1857 ("The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow,. . . are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground."); See also  October 12, 1852 ("A new carpet of pine leaves is forming in the woods. The forest is laying down her carpet for the winter.") and A Book of the Seasons: the pine fall or  The October Pine Fall