A Dream of Life

I've been doing a little soul searching on the limited scale that I can while I'm still so busy. I've been working at home a lot lately, though, so that I can wander a bit more than I would otherwise be able to. I've been thinking a lot about family and friends lately. Something that's been bothering me is that I haven't been as open with them as I'd like (again). I've found myself closing off and holding back some. But now I can do something about it.

I'm reading a great book now, called The Pine Island Paradox. I'm going to get it for everyone I know. It's by a philospher at Oregon State University named Kathleen Dean Moore. It's about loving and caring for people and nature, and it really speaks to the way I feel and think. For example, autumn is my favorite time of year. I love all of the seasons, in turn, and the transitions, but fall is the runaway favorite. I also find myself doing things the hard way on occassion, just because it feels right to do so. One of Dr. Moore's stories talks about both:

IV. SCARLET MAPLE
(Acer rubrum)

In our neighborhood many years ago, there was a lady with a stooped back and a shank of white hair that fell over her face. Her back was so bent that she might have spent her life looking straight at the ground, except that she hooked her head up sometimes and by twisting it sort of sideways, she could see out across her lawn. She lived on the next block, so the children and I passed by her house every day on the way to the elementary school. We didn't see her much during the winter and spring. But in October, she was always in her garden, picking up leaves as they fell, one by one. A red leaf swayed to the ground. She stood with her head crooked up and watched it fall. Then, bent from the hips, she stepped over, picked it up, and carried it over to a bushel basket on her front porch. If she spent all day at the job, she could stay ahead of the leaves, picking up one leaf, and then another.

Erin and Jonathan called her the Leaf Lady. "Good morning," they would say each day. But she must not have heard them, because she almost never looked up from her steady work. "Why doesn't she use a rake?" they would whisper when we had gone a discreet distance past her house. I honestly didn't know. You'd think it would break a person's back, picking up a leaf, reaching down, picking up a leaf. But mayber her hands couldn't hold a rake, or maybe the angle was all wrong, with her bent back.

"Should we sneak over and rake her leaves?" the children would ask, and I wouldn't know the answer to that question either. Was it work, I wondered, picking up each leaf, or was it something different? "You can offer to rake her leaves," I said, but they never did. Once after a wind storm, a Boy Scout troop swooped into her yard, spread out like commandos, and raked the grass clean in fifteen minutes, piling leaves in the street for the city sweeper. But that didn't seem to make any difference one way or another, because she was out the next morning, as she always was, waiting for the next leaf to drop.

That's the end of the story.

The Leaf Lady must have died, I suppose, or moved to a nursing home and then died. In any event, after she'd been gone for a long time, house painters came, and then somebody else moved in. Our children left the elementary school for the high school and then went on to college. So I haven't had much occassion to walk by the Leaf Lady's house, and no reason to think of her.

But one day last fall, I was on my knees in my garden, pulling autumn leaves off the asters that were still giving blooms, though not so many. Scarlet maple leaves had drifted onto the heather, too, and I picked them off and cleared them away from the stems. The varied thrushes wer whistling--odd, this close to winter--and the sun glanced sideways through the hedge. "I should get up and get the garden rake," I said to myself. But I didn't. I stayed on my knees, picking the leaves off one by one, raking the soil with my fingers.

If I had used a bamboo rake, I could have collected all the leaves in a few broad strokes. The soil would have smoothed into parallel lines under my rake, and the leaves would have bunched in front of the tines, and I could have lifted the rake and dumped a whole rake load of leaves into the bin. Then I could have gone on to something else.

But what if all you want to do is pick up leaves? What if you want the autumn day to last as long as it can? What if you want to be in the day from the first chickadee in the morning until the neighbors' children rush shouting home from school with their lunch buckets and construction-paper projects sailing in their wakes? To be in the day until the sun goes so low it finally shines in your eyes, even when your spine pins your eyes to the ground?

Then, each falling leaf, each single leaf slowly falling, marks each moment passing, and you want to pick it up, and hold it in your hand, and be sure of it. Everyone's leaves are numbered, and nothing makes more sense than to gather them, one by one. There is something about the air in autumn, the coldness at the edge of warmth, something sweet and infinitely sad, the cold soil maybe, warmed by low sun, giving its smells straight into the air, sublimating from solid to spirit, transforming itself into something that can enter your body, something you can turn over in your mind: The warmth, the filtered light, the shouts of children, the cascading seasons, the tick of leaves falling one by one.