Metaphysical Mulch

When I was a kid, must have been around 11, I spent some Sundays in the churchyard of a Coptic Orthodox church in Utrecht. One beautiful fall day, my brother and I, and some of our friends, hung out in this yard and invented a game. We called it the leaf catching game. We stood under a tree, looked up, open palms to the sky, and waited for leaves to fall from the branches. If we managed to catch one before it hit the ground, we could make a wish. Whoever caught the most leaves won the game. This is more challenging than it sounds, leaves tend to be erratic dancers.

When I was co-raising my stepson in my 20s, I taught him this game, and every fall we’d go outside to catch leaves together. We spent many hours jumping around tree trunks underneath the nearly hallucinogenic fall shades of Southern Illinois foliage illuminated against the bluest October skies, laughing and wishing away. It always lit up my heart.

One time, in a tense graduate school office building with no windows, I felt so frustrated with the unending amounts of underpaid GTA labor we were doing, taking ourselves so seriously, while knowing the day outside to be golden, literally golden, I said: I’m going leaf catchin’, who’s coming with? And so a bunch of MA and PhD students gathered under a tree that looked like a blazing red and yellow fire in the parking lot, and we waited for a breeze to come. The scene must have appeared like some sort of witchcraft to passersby. Maybe it was. When that breeze came we ran around laughing like children, wildly leaping and grasping into thin air. I felt a deep relief knowing that all of our overdriven brains were still attached to our real bodies like that. That we could still play.

A year later I turned into a falling leaf from the tree of my life. I tried desperately to hold on to my branch, but the breeze was unrelenting. I fell to the ground and got crushed under the weighted boots of existence. Unlike apples, leaves sometimes do fall very far from their tree. Erratic dancers… Blown across the ocean. Composting into fertile soil in the longest winter of my life. That was 8 years ago. Now I’m walking along the canals of the city where I was born and tell all my strolling companions about leaf catching. If you catch one you get to make a wish! Just so you know!

And with every leaf I catch, I remember every other leaf I ever caught. They are strung together on a garland of yellowing October memories from all these different lives inside of me.

And I miss you. And you. And you. And I wish you. And you. And you. Simultaneously.