On Saturday my "almost" (birthday is in 2 weeks) 10 year-old grandson and I were walking back from a Holiday Bazaar and Craft Fair at our church. It was a perfect Autumn day and the colors of the trees against a deep blue sky was beyond beautiful. A carpet of leaves, left there after the rain and wind storm of the day before, crunched under our feet. Neither of us was paying much attention to what was going on around us. We were too busy looking for treasures at our feet to pick up and take home.
What is it about childhood, Autumn, and the overwhelming desire to collect the leaves? I don't know any child (or any child-at-heart adult for that matter) who can resist the urge to collect a bouquet of Autumn's offerings. It's as though Mother Nature put them there for us to take what She has created and create something of our own. It's a right of passage like learning to ride a bike and our first day of school. Leaf collecting is part of our heritage, a gift from nature to remind us that, while everything changes - the trees as well as us - we can take those changes and make something beautiful out of it.
Right now the leaves are drying on the bench by my front door. The next time my grandson comes over, we can take our treasures and do something fun with them. Perhaps we can do leaf rubbings, or trace them to make paper leaves, or start a scrapbook, or any number of things. It doesn't really matter what we do with them as long as we take what nature dropped at our feet and make it beautiful again.
And so it is.
