Falling Leaves

I parked under three deciduous trees and beheld so many leaves of fading red, yellow, green and orange that I felt compelled to write a tribute to their beauty. There was even a single purple leaf serving as an exclamation point, or more likely, a question mark.

A leaf fell, then another. Birds flew into the branches and dislodged more leaves. Fall was on.

Everyone was talking of rain. Rain rolled off everyone’s tongues. The weather people forecast a big rain. They practically guaranteed it. With the storm, the trees will be denuded of their leaves. A few might survive to hang lonely in the branches, but hardly anyone will notice them, except a poet or photographer.

More leaves fell and my mind drifted to a poem, “A Leaf Falls,” by e.e. Cummings. I used the poem with my students in our leaf poetry writing workshop. We would assemble on a grassy field. They would sit down around the step ladder I brought with me. I would climb the ladder a tad higher than the safety instructions recommended. There, I would cast a leaf into the air. The students had until the leaf hit the ground to write a poem.

I’ll never forget the time when a kid bolted up from the ground and caught the leaf before it reached the earth. He then climbed up the ladder (I was still on it) and hurled the leaf (if one can actually hurl a leaf) into the sky. He yelled that he needed more time to write his poem.

Brazen. Rebellious. Dangerous. Usurping my teaching authority. Reckless. Wrecking my finely-honed lesson.

A+

More leaves fell from the trees. I sensed the orange ones were the generals and three green ones the proletariat.

The novel The Virgin Suicides entered my consciousness. I had recently read it for the first time and encountered easily the best leaf scene in American literature (ch. 3, pp 86-89). The author, Jeffrey Eugenides, compared the different methods that various suburban households raked their leaves. “The first weekend after leaf fall, we began raking in military ranks, heaping piles in the street.”

It was utterly original and brilliant and made me wish I could write that well. It’s the kind of scene that I’ll always recall whenever I see a family raking leaves together, which of course, I will never see again because American families don’t rake leaves together anymore.