In the past fortnight, winter has descended into the branches of a big sycamore tree. As if they were the hangers-on at a party, a scattering of leaves are still flying the flag, wearing ready-to-drop yellow. Liberated from the constrictions and crowding of their erstwhile neighbours, they are free to swing in the gappy canopy. As the breeze lifts, they are raised up as one into a rocksteady beat.
Never have the leaves looked so alive as when so close to death. The great pointy-edged plates are picked up wonderfully by the wind as with no other tree around, and seem to dance in a soundless jig.
There are moments when the air currents play tricks and a handful of leaves are whipped up to dash themselves against nothingness, while their fellows quiver gently. A poet might describe all this movement in verse, though, to my knowledge, nobody has penned a sonnet to a sycamore.
In the popular imagination, when the wind blows the leaves do fall, but that is not so. On a day of great gusts, the long, strong stalks were tugged taut, and the whole crown was shaking, but practically nothing broke from its moorings.
It is not the elements but the parent tree that decides, once it has robbed its expendable extremities of goodness, that it is time to cast them off. Two days after the big blow, in near stillness after frost, leaves were raining down – 62 in one randomly counted minute.
A single leaf drops from low in the hem of the canopy, barely noticed since it falls fast and straight. Another is dislodged from high in the crown and begins its long goodbye. It caresses a cluster of crinkled leaves and is rebuffed. It strokes at one branch and then is glad-handed to another, but still it falls. It plummets to trunk level, and then, for a time-stopping moment, it is suspended horizontal, as if it were a parachute, before dipping and dropping directly to the ground. It is there somewhere, indistinguishable from the great mass of the fallen.
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