THE PLAY OF LEAVES
[Illustration]
For fox and partridge, fawn and squirrel--all the wood dwellers that run
or fly--youth, like the rest of life, is a time of stress and effort.
They have a short babyhood and little childhood. Once they begin to move
they must take up for themselves the burden of those that prey and are
preyed upon. They step from nest or den into a world in arms against
them, and while they sensibly fail to worry over this, undoubtedly it
complicates their fun. Baby foxes playing are winsome innocents, but
they have become sly and wary while lambs, colts, and calves are still
making themselves admirably ridiculous in fenced meadows. And neither
hunter, hawk, nor wildcat makes allowances for the youth and
inexperience of debutante game.
It is different with little leaves. They are as playful as kittens, with
their dances, poses, flutters, their delicate bursts of glee. Unless
involved with flowers, or with timber or real estate, they are safe, not
alone in winter babyhood, but through spring and summer, that minister
to them with baths of dew and rain and with the somnolent wine of the
sun. Only when old age has brought weariness with winds and heat, and
even with the drawing of sap, are they confronted by their enemy, frost.
You will say, caterpillars, forest fires, but they are the fault of man
and an unanticipated flaw in nature's plan for letting the leaves off
easily. We brought foreign trees that had their own mysterious
protection at home into lands where that immunity vanished, and so the
chestnut has left us, and apple and rose are threatened by foes whom
their mother had not foreseen. Were it not for man's mistakes the leaves
would have had an outrageously gay time by comparison with the darkling
lives of the creatures that move among them and beneath them.
All winter long in its leaf bud the baby tulip leaf drowses, curled up
tight. It is completely ready to spring full formed into the light as
soon as the frost line has been driven back by the triumphant lances of
the sun, and there it dips and laughs and nods, and sometimes goes quite
wild when a running breeze comes by at the hour wherein morning makes
opals of July's heavy dew. The poplars, the maidenhair trees, shake out
spangles then. The maples show their silver sides. Always the forest
lives and breathes, but when the new leaves come it draws long,
shuddering breaths of delight. Whoever has dwelt with trees knows how
differently the small leaves of May talk from the draped and weighted
boughs of August.
Stepping along the rustling wood road, you can hear the reveries of the
leaves around you. They whisper and sigh in youth; they reach out to
touch the friendly stranger's cheek. In summer they hang their patterned
curtains tenderly about him, in a silence made vocal only by a teasing
gale. In autumn they are loud beneath his tread. Snow alone can hush
them. When they are voiceless they are dead at last, but already their
successors, snugly cradled and blanketed with cotton, are being rocked
to sleep upon the twigs.
The rippling, shimmering birch upon a wind-stroked hill talks with
falling cadence, like a chant. The naiad willow, arching lowland brooks,
speaks as water, very secretly. The oak could not be silent, with his
story of many days to tell, and keeping his leaves throughout the snow
time, his speech is perpetual. Only the pines and kindred evergreens are
now and then melancholy, as if the new needles and leaves looked down
upon the carpet below, forever thickened, of those whose hold grew
faint. Leaves of cherry and apple, born into a world of tinted blossoms,
are gay to the last. The sprays of locust leaves that keep their
yellow-green until the sober tree flowers into clustered fragrance of
white, arboreal sweet peas whisper by night and day of the bats and tree
toads that dwell in their channeled and vine-loved bark. The sycamore's
voice is cool-toned and light, but the mountain ash murmurs low, and
low the beech.
Watching leaves adrift on November winds, there comes the memory of
Stevenson's song of another ended life--of days they "lived the better
part. April came to bloom and never dim December breathed its killing
chill." But the tree that wore them, standing in stripped starkness that
month--if stark means strong--shall enter dazzling splendors when the days
of ice storms come. That miracle of lucent grayness, an elm in the
morning sun, when every branch and every smallest twig is cased in ice
outdoes its green enchantments of June. It is more beautiful than a tree
of coral. It is the color of pussy willows made to shine. It is as gray
as sunrise cobwebs on the grass, as starlight on dew. Its branches,
tossed by January, clash sword on delicate sword, or, left quiet, the
elm stands like a pensive dancer and swings against one another long
strands of crystal beads. And in the city little ice-sheathed maples
along an avenue, glistening under white arc lights, surpass the changing
lusters of gray enamel. Trees robed in ice are the very home of light,
of fire frozen fast in water and turned pale.
Between the going and coming of the leaves the sky is background for the
cunning lacework of twigs. Were it always May, we should never see how
finely wrought is the loom upon which those leafy embroideries are
woven. In autumn the design is more austere, the colors show more
somber, but when the March branches flush with sap, and the buds,
waking, put forth hesitant green fingers, that infinitely complex
tracery of the twigs is a spring charm as moving as the perfume of the
thorn. Outlined against a sunset, it foretells in beauty the months when
the leaf chorus will sound with the birds'.