The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
- Nat King Cole
I drove the Mini convertible last week to Kilgore on a glorious autumn morning. It was a tad warm for November, but no worries. At least the sun was shining, the wind blowing. It was raining leaves instead of actual rain, which we have had in overabundance lately. (Not that I'm complaining, God. I know better than to complain about rain and spark another drought.)
I could smell the sweet decay of leaves riding the wind as they skidded across the sky, a few landing in the Mini since the top was down. An acorn bonked me in the head, which startled me for a second. Acorns and bird poop are the overhead road hazards of driving a ragtop, plus at times eating exhaust smoke from a jalopy that needs a fresh set of rings. Or having one's nostrils assaulted by a powerful whiff of road kill.
But I digress.
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This past Sunday afternoon, I headed back east after watching the Texas Longhorns win the day before. I opted to take the U.S. 79 route, even though it takes a bit longer than my preferred path: IH-35 to Waco, then east on Texas 31 into Longview.
The scenery is nicer along U.S. 79 this time of year. One has plenty of opportunity to admire cows congregating in well-manicured pastures, hardwood trees turning color for miles on end.
Why is it that the most brilliant-colored leaves, at least in East Texas, are found among the scrubbiest of trees, such as the sumac? Is it a metaphor for life, success, unexpected brilliance, something? Maybe it is just God's way of showing that beauty arrives in unexpected places. Or perhaps it has to do with photosynthesis, the right combination of rain and cool weather, soil conditions and other mundane explanations.
I prefer metaphor, of course.
I haven't had the chance to verify this, but I'm told the foliage along the city's hike-and-bike trail from Fourth Street down to U.S. 80 is spectacular this season. The source is reliable — a lover of nature who revels in the crunch of walking on a carpet of leaves. So do I.
My yard is at the benign neglect stage. There is no future in mulching or raking leaves when they're flying off the tree faster than you can stuff them into plastic bags or chop them into pieces. Luckily, my next-door neighbor also has declared a hiatus, so I don't feel compelled to clean my yard just because he did. I hope we can make it until Thanksgiving, but probably one of us will give in to our OCD impulses and crank up the mower before then.
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When I was a kid — actually up into dipping my toe into teenage trauma — I played a solitary game with leaves each fall. I pretended they were wounded soldiers who needed splicing up. I would punch holes in a fat leaf with a twig and try to weave the twig in and out of the holes. Often the leaf would split. I would start over.
I remember sitting in the dead San Augustine grass in the backyard of our house on South 12th Street, on the cusp of puberty but clinging to childhood, playing this game alone, lining up the soldier-leaves as if they were ensconced in a grass-carpeted infirmary. I don't know why I did this with autumn leaves. Maybe it is because my mom was a nurse.
A friend says she used to make "salads" for her younger brother out of batches of leaves of different hues. There you go. Boys patch up wounded soldiers. Girls make salads. One gender is creating something beautiful, the other repairing the mess we have made.
The thing is, I still mess with leaves each autumn, though I no longer pretend I'm stitching up soldiers. But before the trees all have shed their leaves, and I commence to raking and bagging, I will sit on the backporch and fiddle with a hackberry leaf. I will try to remember what it was like to be a child, when life seemed filled with possibility and promise.
Gary Borders is publisher of the Longview News-Journal. E-mail: gborders@longview-news.com.
