A slender northern red oak, planted by my mother in 1981, produced a huge crop of acorns this year.
I never tire of the changing leaves and their spicy, earthy scent: Gold, crimson and orange teased from twigs by a deliberate wind and sputtering rain showers. I pluck and press a few maple leaves in my journal to remember this blustery morning walk.
When I was a small child, I gathered bright yellow elm leaves from our Jefferson Avenue sidewalk. In those years, majestic American elms (Ulmus Americana) lined the streets throughout the Twin Cities. Their branches arched gracefully over us in cathedral form until they were felled by a tiny beetle bearing a mighty disease.
As a young woman, I loved evening runs with a friend in West Saint Paul, MN. After hours of correcting tests and essays, we’d break free into the gift of a warm October night. Dry ash and maple leaves clattered under our shoes as we stretched out into our run on the Stryker and Logan hills. Some nights, a pumpkin-orange moon accompanied us like a lantern sailing through the clouds. Other nights were star-washed and hushed.
Our baby son loved the large, heart-shaped leaves of American basswood (Tilia americana), or linden.
I remember the first leaves I gave to our young son to hold the autumn he was barely a year old: A man’s-hand-sized elm leaf and a heart-shaped basswood leaf from our neighbor’s trees. He loved them and popped out his NUK pacifier to sample a taste. As he grew older, we three took “leaf walks,” one of us on either side of our son, swinging him, his feet swishing along the leaf-buried sidewalks.
A quilt of fallen maple leaves covers our sidewalk in October.
My husband and I still swish through each autumn’s crisp, crunchy leaves, sometimes in the company of birds. Dark-eyed juncos flash their white-and-black tail feathers in shrubs, migrating white-throated sparrows whistle, “sweet Canada-Canada-Canada,” and American robins softly warble in the neighborhood crabapple trees.
American hazelnut (Corylus americana) leaves and catkins dot the landscape with pink and gray near our cabin.
Most years, we savor warm October days at our cabin on the banks of Minnesota’s Snake River. Oak, maple, basswood, hickory and other trees release their leaves, scenting the air with essence of autumn. They sail to earth carpeting the dirt road like jewels. Others float on the river’s surface, bobbing between river rocks and reflecting mid-autumn’s golden light with burnished gold of their own. Some years red oaks set fire to the roadside accented by soft-pink American hazelnut and maroon dogwood.
Northern red oaks (Quercus rubra) flourish along sunny roads in Pine County, MN.
Too quickly, another autumn ignites, glows and slowly fades to embers, etching itself into my memory and my heart.
