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Still Life

Seeding the Snow, Fall–Winter 2000

On my desk lies autumn, at least how I see it this year. A collection of leaves turning, three acorns, and a thin strip of greyed tree bark. I will bring autumn to my nature writing class tonight at Chicago’s Botanic Garden because it is what I will ask my students to do next week—to walk outside and return with autumn.

This exercise is designed for the eyes. It forces you to look at what lives outside yourself. But it is also an exercise of self-discovery. As I will tell my students next week when they bring back their versions of autumn. What you notice says a lot about you. Where you are looking, what you are finding, where you are now in your life.

So I turn inward and study what I have brought back. The three acorns are easy. They are heavy with my parents’ platitudes about frugality and the certain coldness of a wintry world. Though I now can see the abundance of acorns’ fruit, how they drop a life to be lived parsimoniously. So when class is over I will leave them in my backyard for that fat suburban grey squirrel that keeps eating the seeds in the bird feeder. The one who says all I need to know about where and how I live. Confined to a suburban landscape where nature has been plotted, parceled, and betrayed. Where the nearby river never freezes over, so polluted with herbicides and pesticides. And the blue herons nest in the artificial pond behind the Cineplex. Yet, I scour this diminished place for what will feed me. Like the squirrel, intent on finding sustenance for what remains.

The tree bark I reject as a quirk. Some anxious proof that I am balanced against all obsessions. That I understand harmony and what constitutes a pleasing arrangement. Weathered to a fine greyness, the bark is meant to counter the ominous acorns, the erratic leaves. Its rugged surface so suggestive of stability and endurance. Only the tree bark can convince the class that this teacher is centered. Because clearly it is the leaves that dominate my autumn. I have chosen only the deepest hued ones, the most brilliant—like any fall leaf collector, I tell myself. But as I study their mauves, and scarlets, and golds, I see that every single leaf I have chosen was in the process of transformation when it fell, that it was two colors, of two minds, at odds with itself.

I try to look beyond the obvious clichés contained in the leaves. How autumn, represented by the leaves, is that time of change from one season to another. How the season teaches us to accept change as we acclimate ourselves slowly to winters’ isolation. As if autumn only existed to move us from summer to winter. But it is there in the pattern of color change that I escape the clichés. The bur oak leaves clutch their green centers while yellow reveals itself along the edges. I wouldn’t have thought of this as a revelation if I hadn’t read Edwin Way Teale’s The American Seasons. He explains that this yellow is not new. It has been there all summer buried under the green churning of chlorophyll. So this change has always been there, is not unexpected. And, thus, impossible to prepare for. Who can predict when the sun will pull away or not be there for days?

What are these leaves’ real colors? What is their true nature? If their green skin is a mask, a product of easy sun, then is their golden inner layer, which is always present, how loos manifests itself—a flame, a color distinguished and not to be ignored? Since all summer most leaves are uniformly green, it is only when something is taken away that they reveal their individual selves. Each leaf still tries to hold on to its green comfort, to what is familiar and lets it blend. A community of color slipping away because the sun moves away. So loss is golden and brief.

Then there are the scarlets and purples. Teale points out that if yellow is an indication of loss, a subtraction as he calls it, then scarlets and purples are products of addition. Tinted sap within the leaves, stimulated by sun then cold, trap the pigments near the surface. And my red and purple leaves do look flooded with too much. As if they had been overtaken by something gone wild within them. Others looked splotched, speckled with red. Resistant to something they had no control over. Even the one rose-tinted leaf could only keep a slender corner of green. But it too contains within itself this other color, this other self.

I read the message of the leaves that I have brought to my study—the violent colors stripping summer from them through deprivation, or the sudden cold sun releasing a wildness. They are not about transition but patterns of struggle, reactions to things outside themselves but always there, latent within. What pleases my eyes in the gilts and flames ruptures the green harmony of community. Each leaf set on a course of individuality and loneliness. None of them the same; each telling its own story. Finally, what choice do they have but to fall and turn brown, every last one. I cling to the ones that fall in the process of revealing their true selves. All summer the change deep within them.

Tonight I will teach my class. We will go out into the night garden and write about what we see, smell, hear, and feel. I will tell my students about writing and about its connection with the natural world. I will tell them how nature has been a solace for me against loss all year. Because before I leave, as always, I will sit alone and eat my dinner watching the sunset blaze, or not. No longer distracted by children who have grown into their own green, green lives. Tomorrow I’ll place these leaves in the yard along with the three acorns. The greyed bark I’ll keep.