Fall's love affair with leaves

Editor's note: This column originally was published Oct. 17, 1999.

Dr. Leo Buscaglia, teacher, author and lecturer, speaks of his love for leaves, especially when they are dried and rustling. He took big bags of them from east coast to west coast on airplanes! I, too, love leaves, especially during this season.

I've embarked on an experiment that is somewhat akin to watching paint dry. Actually it is even slower paced than that metaphoric description of the passage of time. Some paints dry in twenty minutes, which isn't a big swatch of time. I'm watching a maple leaf turn from green to red. That's a big swatch.

Monitoring is a better word here than watching for the time is interspersed with other activities. I inspect the same leaf each morning and again at dusk, maybe at noon, to see how far and in what direction the color takes.

It is doing me a lot of good. I think I must be making up for some fourth grade school homework assignment that I missed due to measles, chicken pox, or some other childhood interruption, including snakebite. Thus, I'm patching a hole in the tapestry of my life.

And I'm smarter now and can do a better job, assignment or no assignment. In addition, I'm outside a lot enjoying the rest of the pageantry.

I'm making a Big Deal of this. First, I've made a little 40-page booklet by folding plain sheets of paper in half and machine stitching along the fold. Folding again along the stitching, Voila! a blank-paged booklet.

For the cover page I plucked a perfect leaf from my perfect maple tree and traced its outline on the paper. Drew in the veins. With a length of red yarn, I tied two seemingly identical leaves to the twig to which they were attached so I wouldn't be confused from day to day about which leaves I was watching change color. Two leaves, for one could possibly be destroyed midway of its color change and I'd have to wait a whole year to re-launch my experiment.

I'm aware that no two leaves change color exactly alike, due to exposure to the elements. But I imagine they all have the same routine pattern of change.

My first notation was that the pattern of the veins become more visible. They change to a yellowish green until they all come to the point where they converge at the stem. Here the stem turns abruptly to red and this red, in slow motion, flows down to the twig to which it is attached. This is quickest change one can observe.

One day you see a little spot of red in the green leaf. The location of the spot varies. In the next two or three days the spot becomes a splash. In following days the splash explodes outward like some ultra slow, soundless firework in the sky. On its way outward from the splash, the red color stops at some point as if some leafy stop sign has been erected. This is usually where it meets a vein. The red and green are sharply divided and the effect is lovely.

I am reminded of Douglas' book "The Green Light" and have to enter a paragraph or two, reviewing the author's theory of how mankind sometimes comes to a plateau in his upward climb and has to wander about quizzically and impatiently until some leader comes along to blaze a trail upward again on some seemingly unscalable solid rock cliff. I spend some hours wondering if mankind isn't on such a plateau right now, milling about, waiting for a great leader to shout, "Here! This way!"

It took twenty-three days for "my" leaf to become all-over crimson. While it was making these daily changes, with colored pencils, I filled in the leaf on the front of my booklet. When it had reached its red maturity, I picked the leaf from the tree, pressed it between waxed paper and pasted it inside my booklet. With no assignment made, no overseer to grade, I blithely marked an A-plus at the end of my project.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.