Why leaves turn gold

My neighbor is crazy rich. His yard is graced with a 45 foot tall tree of gold leaf. They weren't always golden. He must have won the lottery and decided to show it off to the rest of us by replacing the regular green leaves with these wonderful gold ones. The joke is on him. The leaves are not staying on his fancy tree. The breezes of fall are plucking them to the ground. Tonight I'm sneaking over and loading up a wheel barrow full.

Why should leaves turn such fantastic colors just before they die and fall off? I'm not referring to the science with the different "phyls" in the leaves. I learned that or tried to in high school. I mean why should I look at dying leaves and find their colors fantastic?  When I look at an overripe banana, I am not equally amazed at its color. (Though Grandma Keeler said a banana wasn't ripe unless it had some black spots.) So why do dying leaves draw my gaze with wonder?

Some evolutionists may have generated some sort of explanation for the perception of beauty as a benefit to homo sapiens that has spilled over to my perception of leaves. Perhaps in earlier days people found the sight of reds, purples, golds and rusts instead of lively greens disgusting and our time has it wrong. I doubt both these explanations.

I believe there is a Superior Being who is crazy about color, patterns and light. Before the "bleak mid-winter" sets in, this Being designed these joyous explosions of color to give us hope. Just so we wouldn't miss the message, our eyes and brains were designed to respond to dying leaves as beauty.