I was driving to school when I was stopped by the umteenth red light and sat looking at the time and drinking my coffee. To the right, beyond the car hoods, was a patch of grass among a sea of concrete. In this patch of grass was a very adult tree with leaves covering it completely in yellow and yellow-orange. It caught my eye because the leaves were falling off the tree in a continuous sky to ground motion.
It's odd how in that moment my brain couldn't comprehend the amount of leaves it must take to lose them continuously and not develop barren branches before my eyes. I expected it to stop, take a break or only lose leaves when the wind blew, but this was not how it happened. They just fell and fell and fell from a never ending supply, uncountable. I would focus on one leaf falling from the top and watch it fall down and hit a branch releasing three more leaves that would then fall and release another five each and so on.
This was nature and yet, because I had never seen anything like it before, this constant motion made me think of a screensaver. I knew that the reason they fell so constantly was because of the frost that had developed over night, the weight of the leaves, the higher leaves knocking down the lower leaves, etcetera. Yet it seemed artificially without cause, the way a computer image would.
I had a strong urge to drive over and walk beneath it or lay on the ground and let them cover me in a big yellow blanket, but I needed to get a parking spot at school and time is unfortunately of the essence in our world. What a beautiful world we live in and how sad that we don't have more time to enjoy it.
I am sitting on a sixth floor couch, dreaming of my ground level tree and it's raining yellow leaves.
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