A Leaf

A leaf is only a leaf if you let it be a leaf. Theoretically, a leaf could actually be whatever you decide you would like it to be. For my purposes, this leaf will be a window—not a window glimpsing my imagination, but a window into my past.

A leaf makes me feel reminiscent of my past. The same leaf that now sits on my windowsill could just as easily be the leaf that long ago initially crackled but was later reduced to dust beneath my footstep, blew out to sea, and was absorbed in a high tide. The leaf on my windowsill is green, but the former leaf was not.

The former leaf was glowing orange and fire red. It was in a giant pile of its brothers, some of whom shared the same color, but some of whom were as yellow as the sunshine, as green as the Irish countryside, or even a miraculous purple that occurs only in a select few of those who have fallen to the ground victim of a harsh Autumn wind. Even those leaves whose brown staunchly contrasted the life in their still-green counterparts, did not feel it was their business representing death, as George Moore or James Joyce might have once suggested.

No, those rogue brown leaves refused to represent death. Rather, they represented life to come. They persevered to maintain their status as a longing certainty that everything is cyclical. The children who played atop of these leaves, crushing them into smaller and smaller tattered bits, fed off of their spirit.

I fed off of their spirit. The brown leaves, the orange-red, the green and the yellow, even that miraculous purple. And so it is that a green leaf on my windowsill reminds me of my days spent in youthful bliss.

This green leaf is a window in itself. The window that allows me to view neatly raked piles of Autumns past—when stress didn’t seem omnipresent, worries were few, and jumping in was not a choice but a certainty.

To be continued...