I had an idea for a poetry collection several years ago.
After all, I write poetry as often as many people change their shoes, but I don’t yet have a published anthology.
This particular volume was to bear the title Last Year’s Leaves . The words inside would encompass grief and growing, loss and holding on, sadness and letting go, acceptance and birthing new leaves.
It became yet another one of my stillborn projects that I hadn’t remembered much until I walked my dogs along Alta Vista Drive and noticed, once again, a hearty-and-stubborn batch of last year’s leaves which no one plucked from the limbs of an until this precise moment unnoticed neighborhood tree.
No professional tree trimmer or highly paid gardener had spotted the stubborn leaves and disdainfully proclaimed them ugly.
Or inappropriate.
Or unnecessary.
The leaves just hung there as if waiting for me to notice them.
I imagined some sort of sorceress instructing the leaves (and perhaps the fairies in charge of their falling or not falling) “Your time will come when she finally sees you shouting from within the resting trees.”
There she was, the one leaf that caught my eye. She had a touch of red along with slightly blushing leaf cheeks with highlights of gold.
There I was, far below her, scurrying into the pharmacy.
I took a not-so-very-careful cell phone photo logging the image “last year’s leaves” into my consciousness.
I took my time on my way out after I had solved the need to rush.
I stood directly under the firey leaf, really noticing her, and held her image in my camera.
“Last Year’s Leaf, what do you want to tell me?” I asked as I looked from the image on the camera to the image in the tree, to the tree, to the camera. My eyes next skimmed the ground, scanned the sky. Again, I noticed the ground, to the sky.
Not everything needs a bright shiny red bow lesson to tie up its meaning or reason for existence, but somehow the writer in me feels there is an absence without meaning, without reason, without some sort of growth or life change attached.
Every leaf, every rock, every wind are seeds to be sown in my writing garden.
The photo wasn’t holding her well, I noticed.
“Last Year’s Leaf, what do you want to tell me?”
“There are many things photos cannot hold well.
“Images on film cannot hold your fingerprint, no matter how spectacular equipped it may come. It doesn’t hold your breath, your scent, your intuitive leading to “click” the leaf told me.
“Photos can hold your image very neatly and succinctly, but only you ~ breathing, three dimensional ~ can give it a heartbeat.
“It means, and I mean, nothing until you translate for me”
I took a moment to edit a photo of the leaves. This was almost getting to be too much. I didn’t sign up to be translator for leaves, I was just trying to pick up my medication.
“Wait a second,” my conscience dove in. “As a writer, you are a witness above all. You did sign up to be a leaf translator or whatever the heck shows up in front of you, you may write about it OR it may choose YOU to write about it!”
At my desk two hours later, my fingers stood motionless on the keyboard.
A gulp of black coffee from the Ikea Coffee mug did nothing to help.
Responding to a text from a friend instead of leaf translating did not help.
A deep, melodramatic breath did not help.
The only thing that will help, I was reminded, is writing. Translating. Sketching. Transcribing.
Score after the first writing quarter:
Tree and Leaf – 7
Julie’s Willfulness – 0
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