My neighbor Mrs. Gargan first told me about it. "Have you seen the tree?" She asked as I was sitting in the backyard enjoying the autumn twilight  . "The one down at the corner," she explained. "It's a beautiful tree--all kinds of colors. All the passers-by stop to have a look. You ought to see it." I told her I would, but I soon forgot about the tree. Three days later, I was jogging down the street when a splash of bright orange caught my eyes. For an instant, I thought someone's house had caught fire. Then I remembered the tree. I approached the tree to look at it closely. There was nothing remarkable about the shape of the tree. It was a medium-sized maple. But Mrs. Gargan had been right about its colors. Like the mess of an artist's palette , the tree blazed a bright crimson on its lower branches and burned with vivid yellows and oranges in its center, and deep red at its top. Through these colors were light green leaves as yet untouched by autumn. Walking closer I noticed several bare branches near the top, their small black branches scratching the air like claws. The fallen leaves lay like a red carpet around the trunk. As I was amazed at this beauty, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson's comments about the stars. "If the constellations appeared only once in a thousand years, imagine what an exciting event it would be. But because they're up there every night, we barely give them a look," he made a remark in Nature. I felt the same way about the tree. Because its beauty will last only a week, it should be especially precious to us. And I had almost missed it. Once in the 19th century when a man noticed a brilliant display of northern lights in the sky over Massachusetts, he rang a church bell to alert the whole town's people. That's what I felt like doing about the tree. I wanted to awake the countryside to its wonder. I didn't have a church bell, but as I walked home, I did ask each neighbor I passed the same simple but important question Mrs. Gargan had asked me: "Have you seen the tree?". How did the author call on people to enjoy the wonder?
He rang the church bell. He passed on the same question. He awakened all neighbors up. He required people to the corner.