Why I Love The Dead Red Leaf
You Are a Leaf, One Way or Another.
Note: This piece is now part of Quipper School educational materials under “prose poetry.”
Death in Autumn is silently intense. The leaves, in starvation, drain their faces of green-ness, put on a different color mask. Like Japanese shadow puppets, they tremble in the wind, as though in awe of, or in resistance to, their destiny.
The Aspen, with its dexterous petiole is the prima donna of this dance. Even before the purge by thunderstorms, it hides its face, shows its silvery back, as though to say to Death: I have nothing left for you to take. Scrape me of my pallid life, I will still cling as skeleton to my Tree, my Destiny. The Aspen leaf, eventually fallen, haunts the forest footpaths. It doesn’t just lie there. At the slightest touch of wind, its body quivers so, “No, no, no!” It doesn’t seem to realize nor accept the futility of its struggle. The Don Quixote of the foliage kingdom,the Aspen leaf fights the four-bladed windmill that is the turning of the season. The Aspen leaf is a purgatory soul.
The others, less stubborn, nonchalant and irreverent, foxtrot and skip-to-my-Lou on their way to their graves, which is not to say their final destination. But where ever they may be, they have no qualms about stopping by and invading surfaces that humans love to venerate: Tiffany glass windows, Porsche windshields, Gold Coast French doors, lamp posts on State Street. They lie there absurdly, as though to mock us, non-leaf beings, of our attachment to things too fragile and tentative to be taken too grandiosely. And even when they let go, they mingle with the sticky pods on the playground, waiting for little soles and paws to carry them home, begging to be mulched or compacted or cremated — fast-tracked to their elemental selves. Such contrarians of immortality, such annoying inanimates!
But my favorite dead leaf is the red oak leaf in my salad bag. Compared to the arugula , it doesn’t put up much of a fight. On its second or third day of having been plucked and laid on its own deathbed, it limps as it retreats to the bottom of the bag, in its dark purple brooding. While the spinach postures to bruise the pine nut in its crisp bravado, the red oak leaf, from its meandering surface, relentlessly oozes tears from its suicidal veins, dooming and dragging any leaf it touches into premature expiration. It is the most fragile and vulnerable of leaves — so much like the human heart. It has the deepest color of imponderables — so much like the the human psyche. Its well-being and its ruin tie up with that of its fellow leaves in the gravest of manner, so much like the human race.
Washing each leaf individually, I pay my gentlest respect to the red oak leaf, rubbing off its slimy decay with much care. In deference to its life-and-death cycle, (and in consideration of mine) I always make sure to let go of the ones that tear themselves to pieces at the slightest touch.
