Leaves

It’s already impossible for me to remember what the hills looked like when the trees were bare and the only ground cover was dead leaves.  The woods to the east of the house are tucked behind a dense green curtain now.  I looked into those woods all winter, and I could see the contours of the hill a long way in from the road.  But now all that has disappeared behind ranks of leaves, overlapping and becoming the view.  It is rich and full of life and variety.  The leaves come in a multitude of shapes and colors and structures.  They hide the bones of the trees and the lay of the land.

The tourists are back, and we’ll cede most of the town to them until fall.  We’re grateful for them, for the tax dollars and parking fees they leave, for the businesses they sustain, and we’re glad they enjoy our town.  But life takes a little planning now, for congested narrow streets, for parking places, for tables at the restaurants we’ve kept alive through the winter.  It’s part of the compromise of living here, and it’s an easy compromise to make.  We’ll eat at home more, and we’ll mostly avoid the center of town.  We have our trees, and the tourists can have the shops and restaurants.

The cycles of trees and tourists measure out time,  I’ll be 78 before the leaves fall and the tourists go home.  Looking for a document I needed, I came across some letters my first husband wrote to me after we separated in 1990, 36 years ago.  I’ve lived nearly half my life since the end of that first marriage. It’s as hard to remember the young woman I was then as it is to remember what the hills looked like when the trees were bare.  But looking at those letters, typed on a typewriter, signed with such a familiar hand, I’m carried back to a much harder time in my life. Thirty six summers later I am at ease, with myself and the world.  I have time to pay attention to the seasons.  I have freedom from nearly every worry, every stress; so distant from that tense, anxious time.

I give some of my leisure to poetry. My sister Aviva and her young friend Ella discovered a shared love of poetry and especially of reading poetry aloud.  They launched a group they call Village Verses that meets one evening a month to share poetry out loud.  It’s a delightful hour.  This month the theme was spring, and I recited “Loveliest of Trees” by A.E. Houseman, a poem I memorized in sixth grade as part of a poetry project.  I can remember choosing the poems, printing them carefully, illustrating them with beautifully sharpened colored pencils, and memorizing two of them to recite in class.  I wore a dress my grandmother had made for me with a dropped waist and pleated skirt, a dress I adored.

The poem ends, 

“Now of my three score years and ten, 

twenty will not come again.  

And since to look at things in bloom, 

fifty spring leaves little room, 

about the woodlands I will go, 

to see the cherries hung with snow.”  

In sixth grade, three score years and ten seemed like an impossibly distant future when I would be as old as my wrinkled grandmother.  Yet here it is, in the rear view mirror, with a great many springs of looking at things in bloom in the past. 

Now, Fanny and I walk out into this spring, each looking in our own ways.  She’s very alert, and from time to time she hears or smells something in the leaves on the ground, leaps in the air and pounces. A mouse? A chipmunk? A`bug?  Nothing I can see, but she roots for it in the moist dead leaves that lie under the new growth of bugleweed, dandelion, fern, and forget-me-not. This summer’s leaves will join the dead ones she digs up, and the woods will be enriched.