The leaves fall. Cascading
flurries of yellow. A cheerful flittering of golden light.
I spend October mainly
shifting between the two activities of writing and reading. At more or less
regular intervals, I also put in some exercise. As the hours and days pass, I get
a nice view of the neighborhood through the windows that my desk faces. Cyclists
cycle past, runners run, dogwalkers walk by with their dogs, walkers amble on,
cars roll by, trees change color, leaves tumble down the sidewalk.
There’s a plot of
land across the street in which the neighbor (dubbed the Mystery Gardener by
some other neighbors, so we call him that as well) spends endless hours sifting
mulch, watering things like the mulch pile, and tossing sticks or other organic
matter into places that seem very specific to him from the way in which he
tosses them but seem random and inexplicable to my layperson’s eyes. While I
sit thinking about what my characters should say next, or trying to absorb what
I’ve been reading, I watch the Mystery Gardener garden. It’s immensely entertaining
in all its mystery. One day he lays white-barked split logs on top of his long
mulchy raised beds for no discernible reason (as a marker for something? As
weight? As a repellent for insects or mold?). Another day he scoops one shovelful
of leaves and moss from the street gutters and walks off somewhere with it, holding
the shovel with great care. Why, dear Mystery Gardener, do you do things the
way you do?
As I sit at my desk
and do things the way that I do, I go from one of the four or six books I’m sifting
through for research, entertainment, and growth to another and come across the lines,
“the critical importance of death” and “Death is an essential feature of life.”*
It’s a premise and
the author has yet to go into details, but nevertheless, I write these lines down
in one of my notebooks and think first of how death is critical and then of the
ways that we try to bypass death. Of how we make it out to be something
dreadful and ugly. Certainly, it can be. Certainly, it can be heartbreaking.
Certainly, it is hard. Is all of life learning how to handle losing what we
love because everything dies? Does it have to be that way?
One autumn, in the
northeast, when I was thirteen or so, I asked my dad if the colors of the maple
leaves—turned the red of undimmed hope—could be preserved.
I don’t know if he
knew the answer, but he played scientist beside me. I gathered up some hearty
specimens and the two of us went down into the basement where we set up a
temporary laboratory. This lab contained a workbench, our two different types
of lacquer, newspaper to catch drips, and a clothesline. If I remember
correctly, we attached a string to the stems and then dipped the leaves into the
clear coat lacquers. With clothespins, perhaps, or a clever tying of the already
attached string, we hung them to dry. Some leaves got one coat, some more than
one. We must have recorded our results somewhere with true scientific precision.
Within hours, within days, within the specified drying time, we had the results
of our experiment. Yes, the color of a leaf could be preserved, though, whether
because of the lacquer or time or the natural fading of things even sealed in varnish,
they were not quite as bright as on the trees, not quite as bright as when
first fallen.
I kept one of the lacquered
leaves on a shelf in my room for a long time. Admiring the color and the varnished
shine each time I saw it. The leaf got lost somewhere along the way. I wonder
now, all these years later, how it would look if I’d kept it more preciously. If
that lacquer would have held in that red and kept it as red to this day;
preserved forever.
It’s
not unusual to want to preserve a thing; a color, a joy, an experience, a moment
in time. May this never end! is a cry I’ve felt in my own heart (and a
sentiment I’ve tried to preserve by lacquering maple leaves) while knowing that
part of the beauty of the moment is its transitory nature. Still, knowledge and
desire don’t always agree, we all want to hang onto the things that remind us
of life, joy, and undimmed hope. As the Swedish poet Verner von Heidenstam said
in a letter to a friend, “Why can’t every day have a June evening? It’s so sad
one has to die!”
I think about the
phrases I wrote down. I think about what it would be if everything that had
ever lived still lived. What a crowd that would be. Is death critical if only
for freeing up space? What does it mean that death is an essential feature of
life? Is death essential for growth? Maybe. At least decay is with the break
down of one thing into another and its reassignment of nutrients.
As the season
changes, as I catch the first hint of winter on autumn’s breezes, as June evenings
fade into long term memory, I let these questions of death and life flitter
around in my mind like the yellow leaves feathering to the ground. I don’t have
the answers, scientifically, philosophically, or otherwise. I’m not sure I even
want the answers. There’s no need to head down into a lab and make a scientific
study of this. Not at this moment. Not yet. It’s enough for now to think that change
is a death of one thing and life for another. Death makes space for something new
to be. I ask my mom to send me my winter coat.
As October winds
down, I read on. I write on. I gaze out the window.
Somewhere a
lacquered leaf is caught, like Schrödinger’s cat, between brightness and decay.
Here I sit, at work for now. Across the street, the Mystery Gardener putters in
his lot in his inexplicable ways. And, under all that mulch, decay engenders magic
and the habitat for growth.
*Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in
Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West (p.86)
