Now is the season for leaf-crunch ing. Of course, the red and gold leaves on the trees remind us that it is still fall. But on the ground there are crisp brown ones that I have been enjoying, too.

Since I am in the habit of taking morning walks, on Saturday I thought I would go through the woods behind my house on Tiasquam Road in West Tisbury. I was sure there would be crisp walking there, so I crossed the bridge over the Tiasquam river. Then I headed toward Glimmerglass Pond.

I was quite right. I was soon happily crunching through fallen bayberry and oak leaves. En route to the pond are two boulders. As I skirted the largest, I thought in an overly poetic way that it resembled a bald head topped with a green moss toupee. After I’d rounded it, I reached the waterfall and looked down on Glimmerglass Pond. It was, as it should be, glimmering and was as still as glass, of course.

Edging it, brief though that part of my route down to Music street is, has always been a favorite part of that walk. I duck under the trees and occasionally see a swan or two on the water in summer, and purple iris in bloom. In spring, cowslips erupt from the marsh I must cross to get down to the street. One winter, after a deep snowfall, I could barely recognize where I was, the trees by the pond were bowed so low by the snow. But that was quite all right, too, for I was crunching through snow. At this leaf-crunching time, however, I am simply enjoying the fallen leaves.

It’s far too soon, of course, to be thinking of Christmas. Thanksgiving, after all, arrives this week, but as I walked through the leaves, all the same, I recalled Clement Scott Moore’s poem: The Night Before Christmas. I was pleased that “the leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky,” are not flying, as they do, of course, in Clement Scott Moore’s poem but are still on the ground for me to crunch.

At snow-crunching time, I follow animal tracks and wonder if they are deer tracks or rabbit tracks, or tracks of some animal I do not know. I call Gus Ben David, of course, who patiently listens to my descriptions of squiggles or paw prints in the snow and tells me whose tracks I am following.

On one memorable snow-crunching walk, I got lost in a blizzard in the West Tisbury cemetery. I was crossing from Isaac and Trudy Russell’s home on Scotchman’s Lane. I eventually emerged, but only after a longer-than-usual Island snow crunching episode.

Leaf-crunching in the cemetery is more sensible than snow-crunching, I decided then, and, just now, there are pumpkins decorating the cemetery entrance, put there by Anne Burt in remembrance of Armistice Day. It’s a bit of a toss-up which I prefer, leaf-crunching or snow-crunching, but I surely am looking forward, now that fall is almost done, to crunching through fresh fallen snow on Music street and by Glimmerglass, along the Panhandle, and over Brandy Brow Hill-another favorite walk of mine. I realize, of course, that I am in the minority.