Fall Leaves

I believe a small thing wakes up in late September: A freshness that is particularly present on mornings after a deep cold. Russian folklore tells of an ancient man, Father Frost, who is the heart and the bringer of winter. But he is only in his infancy in the fall, whispering stories of hunting and preparing, pulling shadows out and painting the land more and more golden with each brief sunset. 

This time of year the leaves burst into color and take flight, and when they fall they rot and bring up a smell that only this climate achieves: the weight of summer becomes damp and cold, and yet there is life beneath the dead leaves. Even though the air is cold and thin, there is something in it: a veil, a shadow, an approaching, a growing, of some dark and crystal and mysterious thing.

Among life’s unknowns to which autumn consistently points, there is yet to be a fully formed explanation for fall foliage. Broadleaf trees, the trees which change color, use a massive amount of energy to create and maintain their leaves each year. But those thin green hands extending from the maple and oak and sycamore, take in much more chlorophyll than their evergreen counterparts and so can afford to lose their leaves each year. 

When the days get shorter, and the ground gets cold, the green: the chlorophyll, collected throughout the summer, gets sucked back into the branches of the tree, like a turtle into its shell. When this process occurs the leaves are left with what was beneath them the whole time: yellow, orange, red, sometimes purple. The yellow and the orange come from the same chemical that makes flamingos and shrimp pink, carotenoids. 

No one knows why the leaf turns red. 

And yet for a few short weeks, these countless trees reveal a secret color just before losing their leaves for the season. 

Maybe this arboreal phenomenon models exactly the mystery the season brings: a secret rises to the surface, for just a moment, before plunging away.