Thanks, Sandy.

In just the past week, my neighbor's tree has made morning magic. I'm so glad I noticed it, though the tree had to do something drastic to get my blurry morning attention.

Heading to the kitchen first thing to turn on the teakettle, I was stopped in my tracks to see a chartreuse glow on the cupboard door.

Out the window, Sandy's tree was alive with light, the morning sun shining through its transforming leaves, green, gold, yellow, reflecting through my kitchen window. The teakettle had to wait while I fed my eyes on the color.

In the title song of the movie, "Gigi," Louis Jourdan sings about his befuddlement at Leslie Caron's transformation from girl to woman, seemingly overnight.

My neighbor's tree, it seems in just a year, has become a grown-up. This summer, it lifted up lush cover near my deck, rustling itself soothingly in the heat in a place where there wasn't enough room to plant a tree of my own.

And now this, this apple-gold color to accompany my morning coffee.

All grown up and a beauty.

Once you choose to tune your ear and eye, the world is full of gifts. There are pictures everywhere - full-blown portraits and suggestive sketches, pale watercolors and bright fingerpaints, stained glass, mosaics.

Because we live in a place with seasons, most of these scenes are always changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.

After a while, you learn to watch for the brief moment when they appear.

For example, for a short time, from the living room window, the orange berries of my mountain ash provide a contracting backdrop for the rosy clusters of fruit of the "Radiant" crab apple. If I'm lucky each year, I'll be there to smile at the swarm of little cedar waxwings as they frantically strip the orange off the mountain ash, gobbling down the berries and then leaving.

As the leaves start to fall from the poplars, it's time to take notice again of the indescribable powdery-teal of the tips of the blue spruces. Remembering how soft and silky their new growth tips are in the spring, so that you can't help but stroke them like a cat.

I had to pull out a purple-leafed plum because it grew straggly and in the wrong place, but I actually left it in for two extra years because of those moments in the fall, with the sun at just the right inclination behind the leaves, they would glow like fire and garnets, arresting you with impossible saturation of color.

That's why I'm still tempted to plant barberries, though I still carry thorn wounds from past days. It's the color, burgundy-rich.

Fall also means that dappled shade has moved to new places; the high sun of summer which held the shadows tight against the tree has shifted. Trees now throw their limbs and leaves in different places, novel autumn places.

As leaves drop, the rich green sheltered well of back yards opens up again to its wide winter view of sky and the river bottom.

So my neighbor's tree will shed its bronzy-gold and this winter offer a view through its branches of blue sky and faraway river bluffs.

Thanks, Sandy.

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or krherzog@ndonline.com.)