“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him”
1 Corinthians 2:9
I took my Fall Walk this afternoon.
You might know the one: The one when you forget, for a time, that you are a grownup and you are supposed to behave like one.
The one where the neighbors, if they see you, wonder what you are up to and whether or not you are going to mess up their carefully-raked piles of leaves on the tree lawn.
I absolutely love shuffling through the fallen leaves. I have a friend who, when we eat salad with croutons, his eyes twinkle and he giggles as those croutons crunch so loudly neither one of us can hear anything outside our own heads. It's the same with a good Fall Walk.
Have you noticed? Leaves are not just leaves. They aren't just different colors; they have different levels of crunch.
Sycamores are the best. There is a huge sycamore up the street. Those giant, rusty-brown leaves, big as my hand, by their very size seem to pack extra shuffle value. They crackle and crunch as I make my way through them, dragging my feet without lifting them off the sidewalk. (It's the same walk Peter uses to make tracks in A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.)
Love those sycamore leaves. Especially in someone else's yard.
And then there are the oak leaves, a composter's nightmare. I do believe, if you put a pile of oak leaves in the compost bin, when you come back in two months you will still have-- a pile of oak leaves. They simply do not decompose.
But they crunch! The corn flakes of autumn, they also get soggy fast when it rains. G-r-r-r-eat.
Maples, lindens, ash-- these leaves seem to stay soft. They're gorgeous, bringing their yellow and red to the sidewalk art show. But their shuffle power is-- limited.
Different leaves, different gifts. Just like people.
Today was a beautiful day for a Fall Walk.
Even in this season when Creation seems to be dying back, when the chill winds of winter lurk just around the corner and the promise of snow hangs in the air, still God brings us so many ways to celebrate him.
Color and crunch. Whispers and watercolors. Absolute perfection.
Feast for eye and ear.
(Go on. You know you want to. I won't tell anyone. And if you want to mess up my leaf piles-- wait for me!)
Walking home from voting this gorgeous afternoon, I dawdled. I picked up perhaps a dozen different leaves, carefully selected for their shape and color. I fanned them out on my kitchen table and just admired them.
ReplyDeleteI am SO going to walk over to your planet asap and crunch through some sycamore leaves.