Yellow Leaves

I was stopped in my tracks the other day by the first tree with yellow leaves.  I just stood there as we confronted each other-- me with all my preconceived notions of what a tree should look like during the month of August, it with its own defiant existence speaking for itself.

In that moment, I was so surprised by the sudden change that I had not yet built up my own existential defenses.  And I've been trying this whole time to put a label on the feeling that assaulted me in that moment when I had my guard down.  It was something like awe-- seeing the power of nature in its earliest moment of visible change.  But it was also something like dread, the yellow leaves having always been for me something of a memento mori.  At the same time, it was something like joy, a looking forward to scarves and new olive oil and young wine.  But it was also a deep, lamenting sadness, knowing that the days of tingling sunshine warmth on bare skin are numbered.  And so I found myself standing dumb-founded in the piazza like an idiot, laid emotionally bare at the sight of a single tree, with this almost-awe, almost-dread, almost-sadness, almost-joy coming together in an aching knot in the pit my stomach.

I speculate that I find myself so defenseless, so powerless in the face of the onset of the Fall because I grew up in place where the fluctuation of seasons was minimal.  When the variety of seasons ranges from not-that-cold to warm to hot to inferno, the changing of the leaves is less dramatic and the change in temperature and life even less so.  Although I grew up coloring pictures of yellow leaves as backdrops for turkeys and pumpkins, I did not so much recognize them in the world around me and so I don't yet take this endless, beautiful cycle of death and re-birth for granted.

In the moment when those yellow leaves entered my consciousness and I was feeling in my gut and in my bones that wrenching and releasing, I was somehow feeling how many times this moment, this breathless moment at the cusp of two seasons, had existed without me here to witness it and how many times it will continue to exist when I am long gone.  And in confronting these yellow leaves, I am standing face-to-face with how little this whole system has to do with my own wishes and desires, how little control I have and that ultimately, I am but a single, microscopic piece of something incomprehensibly bigger than myself.

I can't help but think that this is all good preparation for the day when I will wake up and again be stopped in my tracks by the yellowing of my own leaves.  I hope that I will remind myself of and take consolation in the beautiful, fiery Fall landscapes and the abundance of the autumnal harvest.   And when the yellow leaves of my own Autumn yield to the brown of Winter, as they inevitably do, I hope I'll remember how equally inevitably, the brown of Winter always yields to the fresh, hopeful green of Spring.