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Leaving Time

The Source

A good friend called me on a business matter last week and before he hung up he said, “Oh yeah. …this may sound weird but the coolest thing just happened.” He’s in management and said he was driving to an important meeting last week when something stopped him. The guy lives in a beautiful home in the country but works in town. He said, “I was hurrying to work. When I woke up that morning my wife had a load of honey-do’s for me to get done before I took off, so I was breaking the speed limit on the way to the meeting, then I saw it.” He said that just as he’d rounded a curve on his two-lane road, he was greeted by a shower of color. “It was amazing, Ken! It was like this waterfall…this cascade of leaves falling on the road. I’d never seen anything like it.” He went on to describe the torrent of yellows, oranges and reds falling from the trees. “I knew I had to get to that meeting, but I knew that this was a moment to remember so I pulled off the road to watch.” The guy went on to tell me that dozens of grain trucks and harried commuters sped by him as he sat there on the side of the road, entranced by this once in a lifetime moment. “It’s like they wouldn’t stop,” he said. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen!” The man was a bit late to his meeting but since he was the manager in charge I suppose that everything worked out for him on that autumn morning. But I appreciated not only the fact that he stopped to watch the miracle of falling leaves but that he’d have the nerve to share such an unusual and admittedly illogical experience with someone else. I was flattered that he thought I was someone who’d not laugh. Autumn is truly the reigning queen of seasons in the Midwest. Summer leaves us panting and sweaty, our winters are often the stuff of nightmares, and too often our springtime is so storm ridden that we miss the miracle of rebirth while we huddle in our basements riding out the next tornado warning. But autumn leaves us alone to enjoy what beauty the end of life can bring. I don’t think I can be accused of waxing to philosophical to say that it’s the best of seasons. I have another friend who farms on a large scale in the Jacksonville area. He said, “Even rushing to get the corn out, it’s nice to be surrounded by such great scenery. I don’t miss fall just because I’m out working in it. Heck, I get to see it every day.” I used to live on Woodland Place in Jacksonville and just up the street was a sweet old gal who’d bundle herself up every autumn and sit in her front porch as long into autumn as her arthritis would allow. “Don’t like heat and don’t like snow,” she said, “and spring’s too unpredictable.” But come October I’d drive home from my college class to see her sitting bundled on her porch every afternoon, watching the leaves fall and enjoying the kids kicking their way through the foliage on their way home from school. She belonged to the anti-mulch, anti-bag contingent. “Hell, I like leaves!” she’d tell me. “Who in the hell wants to bag up such pretty things or grind ‘em into dust?” I don’t know what her well-tended neighborhood thought of the eccentric lady in the middle of the block who’d simply let her leaves fall then blow into the adjoining yards, but I appreciated her grit. And I guess that one of the most glorious things about falling leaves is that they set their own schedule. No matter when your county or village sets its Fall Color Drive, the leaves will fall when they darned well please. In a tightly scheduled world of extreme predictability, it’s nice to find a force in the universe that can’t be controlled. One of the most remarkable feats of leaf dropping I’ve ever seen concerned the Ginkgo tree. Any tree expert knows that if you plant a Ginkgo you must make sure it’s a male. I mean no disrespect to the females of the world to say that a female Ginkgo is the worst thing you could ever plant in your yard, but someone once donated two male plants to Triopia and the custodians planted them in the front courtyard of the school. An amazing thing, the Ginkgo. On a day determined only by God and the tree, every Ginkgo in the area will drop all its leaves on the same day. I’ve stood in front of the school on the “drop day” and have been amazed. The leaves fall so fast and furiously you can hear them dropping a block away. There are still a few leaves left. Leave some time for the leaves.