Fallen Leaves

 

Autumn in New England is arguably one of the most beautiful scenes anywhere in the world. Every year I feel like I’m seeing it for the first time. Walking in the woods, looking out my living room window, going for a bike ride, I am constantly bombarded with brilliant splashes of color that take my breath away. I never tire of it.

All too soon the leaves fall to the ground, get raked up and put onto compost piles, or noisy leaf blowers scatter them into the woods, leaving only barren, gray trees waiting for the first snow.

But, happily, there’s another stop along the way between the awe-inspiring artistry of a horizon resplendent with luminous red, yellow, orange, rust, and green, and the drab, neutral tones of approaching winter. 

Last week, Rob and I were traveling along a two-lane highway through the New Hampshire countryside, on our way to buy a new car. Rob was driving; I was looking out the window. It was a cloudy day, past the peak of the foliage, and the deflected sunlight brought out the richness of the colors of the leaves still hanging on. But it was a tree with only a few remaining stragglers that caught my eye. Not the tree really, but the pile of leaves that lay in a circle underneath, leaves that still sparkled with brilliant colors. That barren tree overlooking a pile of myriad colors struck me as incredibly beautiful.

I said to Rob, “There has to be a metaphor in the beauty of the leaves sitting under that tree.”

Not surprisingly, I thought about death. Rob’s mother had passed away the previous week. Because of the pandemic, he was unable to visit her in Wisconsin, nor will he be able to go out for the burial of her ashes. 

I said, “Each one of those leaves is like a memory of the person who died. You can pick one up and examine it and remember something special.”

That evening we were working in the kitchen together. I was preparing a roast chicken dinner and Rob was making apple crisp for the first time. He said, “My mother used to make apple crisp. I remember she would tap dance around the kitchen when she was cooking.”

I said, “You just picked up a leaf and found a memory in it.” 

This isn't the tree I saw while we were driving, but hopefully I captured the idea.

All these leaves come from one oak tree in our front yard. After I took this picture, Rob raked them all and the yard was clear. A week later it again looked just like this picture. 

I guessed that falling leaves can easily lead to a death metaphor. I wanted another one.

I said to Rob, "The tree with the leaves on the ground is our bike trip."

For many years our bike trip circling the United States was just an idea, a sapling that grew into a full-grown tree when we took off last June, heading west from New Hampshire, then south along the Pacific coast, and east to Florida, where, on St. Patrick's Day, the pandemic cut it short. 

Something we’d looked forward to for so long, now completed, that tree has lost every one of its leaves. But there they are, lying on the ground still with all their brilliance, each one a story of an adventure we didn’t know we’d have.

The recent news of wildfires throughout California had us reliving our memories of three beautiful days in Mendocino. We had worried about wildfires, especially after our daughter was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2018, saw a fire start, and hiked off the trail to find herself in an evacuated area. But we were lucky. One fire inland from us and a shutdown of electricity in two counties left us stranded in Mendocino. We had plenty of food and a comfortable place to stay in a historic town with a stunning coastline. 

Even this story has so many stories within it - how we found a place to stay; our dinner at a fine dining restaurant celebrating an anniversary when the generator failed; the woman at the bed and breakfast who Rob charmed - she gave us two bottles of wine; talking our way into the hot tub after the electricity went out only to have to share it with a very large man wearing nothing at all; Rob borrowing a guitar and the hummingbirds coming to listen while he played outside. 

Since returning from our trip we've run into people who want to hear more about it and we tell them that we'll do a presentation once the pandemic is over and we can do it live. But how will we choose which stories to tell and which to leave out? The memories from Mendocino alone would take up at least a dozen of those fallen leaves. We'll have to pick just a handful of leaves out of that giant pile and say, "These are the stories we will share with you."

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When I was a young child, I remember picking up the most brilliantly colored and perfectly shaped leaves, taking them home and pressing them, in a book or between sheets of wax paper. Happily for us, we don't have to choose which "perfect" memories we'll save. They may fade over the years, but between Rob and I will hold onto at least as many stories from our trip as there are leaves under one of those trees.

After the leaves have been cleaned up, and winter has made the world outside go dormant, spring will come and new buds will form on the branches of our tree while we make plans for our next adventure.