A November snow will give the land an early winter look and hide the leaves that have dropped from the trees in a cycle all their own. From lawns and gardens fastidious rakers make piles of their leaves and cart them off somewhere out of sight to rot, but where I live the process of leaf decay needs no human help. It’s practically a miracle, our home perched on a hilltop where prevailing winds do the raking for me. By mid-November only the stragglers remain, sheltered in the lee of corners or under lilacs where they do no harm. There are no neighboring yards to catch my windblown leaves, so each year I spend more time thinking about them than anything else.
The cycle begins in August with preview streaks of red and yellow and ends two months later when the laggard tamaracks paint their needles gold. In between, the explosion of color will take even a stolid Yankee’s breath away. Who doesn’t know the surprise of turning a corner on a gloomy day to see what looks like a shaft of sunlight beneath a naked tree only to discover it is just an apron of brilliant leaves?
After the glory stage, the woods fill with leaves at first so crisp they crunch beneath your feet and warn the forest animals a quarter-mile away. In the dark of night you can hear the leaves drop in fluttery cascades whenever there is a puff of wind or in single ticks when the air is still. Later, November rains soften and dissolve the matted leaves and raise about them a nutmeg smell.
Each year I look with fresh wonder at the enormous scale of nature’s shedding, where leaves drawn from just a few acres with a celestial rake could bury a house and barn and leave behind no hint of their shape. In contrast, the leaves and clippings I stir with table scraps for garden compost make paltry fare, and on a warm and lazy afternoon I’m likely to wonder if there might be a way to harvest leaves for food or fuel or to make fresh soil for wind-blown Midwest farms. When the whimsy passes, I can clearly see that in nature’s grander scale nothing is ever really wasted.
This leaf-borne rumination never lasts because I count my days in human time where, compared with nature’s slow ticking, a lifetime flies by in just a few years. To make the most of our time on Earth, we humans take up the axe and plow for food and plan our cities with gridded streets lined with cultured trees. Nature’s wildness makes us nervous, so we beat back the weeds believing that a little order is better than none at all.
I confess I have an eye for new-mown grass, and over the years I’ve added a couple of acres to what I used to cut in a single hour. I trim back the persistent brush that grows along stone walls, and I trim around the base of nearby trees. But when I step into the woods, I know who’s boss. The forces there at work to shape the landscape — the beetles and porcupines and woodpeckers and deer, the water seeps that freeze and thaw to sheer a ledge — are far beyond my control, and happily so. In the woods I walk with the stride of a liberated man.
A pleasant thought, and like most of mine these days, it’s only partially true. In the woods, I can’t help pulling up invasive buckthorn sprouts and hanging them in sapling clefts to die. When I cut trees for firewood, I heap the slash into tidy piles, bringing shape and order to a place that once was wild. The temptation to manage is always there, the slope is always slippery.
This winter when our woods are deep with snow, loggers will arrive to remove some of the trees from our woods in a “management plan,” required by our participation in Current Use, the tax incentive offered by the state to keep farmland and forests sustainable and productive. I find the rationale compelling, but at first the logging will seem noisy and brutal. They will stack the skidded timber at the top of our hayfield before they truck it to mills, and the stumps they leave behind will look raw and weepy for a year or two before they begin to weather and rot and sink back down into the welcoming earth.
To prepare for logging, I walked the woods with a forester and watched him mark which trees to cut and which to leave alone. His sense of time and scale were tuned to nature, and in his imagination he saw my woods decades into the future and far beyond my time. And because I want these woods to last forever, I heard his plan without fear or dread.
Our woods were last logged in the early ’60s, when they belonged to the farm at the foot of our hill. At that time I was a boy living far away on a city block with houses so tightly packed they sometimes shared a common wall with the house next door. The front of ours opened onto a treeless sidewalk, and behind there was a tiny yard too small for a game of catch. And yet, in that tiny yard someone a generation before had planted a mulberry tree and a grapevine that each year dripped with smoky fruit. My thoughts those days were on other things — on sports and girls and getting away — and I remember so little else. I think I never imagined myself in the final quarter of my life looking back or the annual thoughts that would run through my head each year when the leaves begin to drop.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.