Leaves & Leaving

I saw a woman pluck three maple leaves this morning.

WMATA was on its usual BS today, and I had to take a bus instead of my typical train to work. Cool. (I won’t bother you with the details of that horrifying trip.) The bus route also required a mile walk from the bus stop to my building. Even better. I opted out of complaining, though I wouldn’t have my morning me-time at the office and my hands were starting to freeze in this 61 degree weather, despite having only been outside for five minutes.

On my way down Wilson Boulevard, I saw a woman stop mid-stroll and thoughtfully pluck three Crimson King maple leaves. She eyed them with a tilt of her head, twisted her mouth into a satisfied half-smile, and carried on.

It brought me back to when we were little and my family would come down to visit from Brooklyn. Aunt Pat and Ashley were our favorites, and each time they visited, my siblings and I would send them back to the city with a little piece of Virginia. Just as sure as Aunt Pat would board her bus to DC with a bag full of foil-wrapped fried chicken, boiled eggs, 5th Avenues, and Pepsi, she would go back to Brooklyn with the “preserved” leaves of the yellow poplar, sycamore, sugar maple, and scarlet oak.

They call me Aunt Pat’s body twin, us both having hips for weeks and a waist for but a minute. Every visit, Aunt Pat would stand at our back door, hands on those hips, while the breeze blew through the screen. She seemed to be lost in thought, and though we dared not disturb her, we liked to creep about nearby and listen to her mutterings.

“Lookie here, I see a deer,” she would say, pushing her glasses up on her nose and running her hand over her signature red bandanna. Sometimes she sang songs about the leaves to the tune of whatever was on her mind. “Look at the reds. And the yellow yellows. I like the oranges, I do, I do, I doooo,” she would croon a la Lena Horne.

I think it was my brother’s idea to try and save them for her. Mark was the genius scientist of our bunch, and where his harebrained ideas led, my sister and I would follow. Our means of
preservation was Ziploc baggies. When Aunt Pat had settled into the living room to enjoy peanut butter cookies and Soaps with Gram, we got the okay to be released and began our search for the reddest reds and the orangest oranges. Each leaf was stored in its own flattened, air-free, Ziploc bag and handed to Aunt Pat at her departure.

Aunt Patricia has since lost her arm-wrestle with lung cancer, and Ashley? Well she just started reading my blog on Wednesday (hi Ashley!). I’ve been to so many burials and funerals (16 and sadly counting), that I can’t quite remember what her grave site looks like. Wherever she is, though, I hope there’s a sycamore nearby. And I hope the oranges drift near her headstone in the Autumn breeze. I do I do I dooooo.