GROWTH RINGS

One of the imposed privileges in splitting the oak sections stacked up in the far corner of the garden by the gate is that because of the temporary logistics I have to walk from the splitting stump (under the plum tree in front of the deck) to the big pile of sectioned oak laying there amid the big mess of leaves and branches, and one-by-one carry the sections back to the stump where I split and stack them.

Then I get to walk back over the garden ground again, empty armed in the fresh exhilaration of moment-ago labor, and on this perfect blue cool fall day enjoy the heft of the light on the goldening grasses, all laid out like in a world-sized museum with exhibits of fallen leaves gleaming in the bright, from the shiny ribbed red-tan of the chestnut parchments just starting to fall, to the big oak leaves now pieces of golden buckskin, and the changing leaf-hearts of the dokudami still rising from the ground, putting on that mottled rainbow show they do each year at this time; and never are the lily leaves so beautifully themselves as when the low wintering sun shines right through them from the side, turning them into blades of imperial jade swaying in the slightness of the breeze, when on the same breeze come drifting the first of the day-glow leaves from over in the other corner of the garden where the momiji reaches for more, scattering its handspans of red and gold here and there among the buckskin on the ground, what a show it all is, then I arrive at the pile, pick up a big chunk of trunk to carry back to the splitting stump, and then when that's done I get another new walking show, all the blue morning.

Just the sound of the leaves beneath my feet carries me back to childhood days when rainbows of maples covered everything in kid-made mounds of leaves, that walking-through-them sound linked forever with the fun of being the child who centers me like the oldest ring in a tall oak tree.

All the mysteries there are...