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.
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!”
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.
