Dancing and Falling

The leaves are changing colors.

Alli is sitting at the kitchen table eating a chocolate creme donut (Hi. My name is Cat and I’m a pastry enabler.). Unlike TD and Mack, who speedily dispatched their own afternoon treats and are now happily picking their way through the boxes in the attic in search of those elusive Halloween costumes, Alli enjoys the thrill of the ownership. La la la, this is my donut and I will lick at it and take teensy weensy bites and love it forever or at least until TD and Mack come downstairs and are so so jealous of me and my donut because theirs are all gone and I still have mine la la la!

I look at her, hand tightly grasping a Halloween-themed pencil (black eraser! woooooo…), her little tongue sticking out from between her teeth as she works out the intricacies of alphabetical order. Every so often she is arrested by the discovery of some heretofore-unnoticed stray dusting of powdered sugar on her fingers, and it’s like Christmas all over again, I see it in her eyes, as she licks it off.

Beyond her, through the kitchen window, I see leaves floating by, falling and dancing in the wind. The thin branches in the trees are softly swaying and waving, shaking off the leaves, setting them free. And I think to myself that it is beautiful and sad, all at the same time. Beautiful because the leaves paint the air with lovely warm autumn hues of russets, burgundy, and brown. Sad because although they break free to dance with the wind, they have no place to travel but down to the earth where they will end up trampled and rain-battered, stuck in dampened heaps on my porch. Trapped, yearning for just a few more minutes– seconds!– of flight on the wind rushing by, but they are weighed down, too heavy. Tired. Weary. Done.

I look back at Alli. She has moved on to reading aloud a book of puppy riddles, and I smile as she giggles to herself. Then another leaf catches my attention. It swirls and twirls– loop-the-loop!– and disappears from my view. Go little leaf! I chant silently. Don’t fall yet! Fly just a bit more…

I hear worrisome noises coming from the attic: voices raised, loud thumping– a crash. There is a good chance the battle over the black dementor shroud will come to blows, but I smile anyway as the sound of my family washes over me, through me, and I realize I am like those leaves outside, gradually growing and changing colors, no longer the fresh, pale green of a newly budded leaf, but not yet the russet shade of the trampled, weary leaf, yearning for one last flight. I’m a shade in between. A lush forest green with hints of olive, goldenrod, and palest yellow, and perhaps even a thin streak of burgundy running throughout. And I’m dancing and swaying and floating, with really only one possible destination, but there are others dancing with me, and we fly together, always together, painting the sky with our myriad colors, for better or worse…

And the view? Is absolutely amazing.

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