A Leaf In Time
In a vibrant forest, Maple, a joyful leaf, witnesses the beauty of life and the cruelty of nature as her world undergoes a drastic transformation.
Maple knew life was good. She felt it intensely ever since she first sprouted from her branch into the warm and inviting forest. She loved basking in the sun—her vibrant, verdant skin soaking up the photons to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates for food. It made her proud to provide nourishment that reached as deep as the tree's roots. Although she didn’t completely understand it yet, she knew this relationship between the sun and her tree went back many cycles. So many cycles ago, she could hardly imagine it.
Maple wasn’t one to sweat the things she didn’t know. She had a purpose and enjoyed what she knew, like the wind. She loved flapping in its breezy gusts as it traveled up from the valley floor onto the ridge where she hung. Sometimes, it even felt like she would detach and shoot out into the great wild of the forest, which excited her, though she was glad she never actually did. Or even the rain! She remembered the feel of the first drop of liquid splashing against her blade. Initially, she was scared, but as the clouds’ tears fell from the sky, she fluttered excitedly. Water was life, they said.
She enjoyed aspects of being a leaf that some of her fellow leaves did not, like the squirrels. Most despised them—a ratty and obnoxious nuisance that disturbed the peace. But Maple loved them. She crinkled and shook as they chased, hopped, and danced from branch to branch, shaking the young leaf until she was dizzy. She also enjoyed the deep night, when the quiet stillness would be interrupted by the soft crunches of paws from nocturnal animals like opossums and raccoons. One time, she even heard the elusive call of a screech owl. It sounded so close to her then. Some of her friends, like Chewed, Red, and Sugar, found it odd that she enjoyed a time of the cycle when the sun didn’t shine, but she believed that even night had its purpose, though she couldn’t place an apex on what that was.
Maple breathed in the fresh air, soaked in the sun, and enjoyed the forest's life for many cycles. She watched deer frolic, birds sing, and bees swarm. She heard the haunting call of a loon. A bird, she was told, had red eyes, and listened for the soft patter of bat wings at night. To her, everything was beautiful, and it filled her with joy.
She felt fear for the first time when a bright flash turned the darkness into day for a brief, terrifying moment. It was followed by a deafening boom that shook the earth and the trees. Every leaf across the horizon curled to protect itself as the rain raked across their blades like a thousand bullets. Maple thought her petiole would detach as the branch croaked and bent from the force of the wind. The bolts of white fire zigzagged across the sky, and the thunderous booms followed them like echoes. When dawn broke, and the storm waned, there was collective relief among her friends and fellow leaves. But the forest was different.
The fiery strike of a lightning bolt felled a hemlock tree. Maple’s tree shuddered with the loss. The whole forest entered a solemn state of mourning. The sun stayed hidden behind the metallic grey of depressed clouds. She didn’t know for sure, but she was told there weren’t many Hemlocks left in the world. Evergreens were seen as the wisest of trees in the forest. They also tended to be the oldest. Margin told Maple that this hemlock was at least seventy thousand cycles old. SEVENTY-THOUSAND! She couldn’t comprehend how long that truly was. Maybe it was because of that knowledge or because she witnessed death for the first time that she finally felt sad. Chewed ruffled to her that this is how everyone meets their end, but Chewed was known to be dramatic, so she didn’t believe him.
A fog hung in the valley below. The deep night was eerily quiet. Maple was startled awake by Red, who was in a panic. The moon’s cool light revealed the ice crystals covering Red’s blade and the tree branches. It took Maple a moment to realize she was also covered in these crystals. She could feel their painful chill down through her midrib to her petiole. No leaf or plant was spared from the frost as the leaves that woke became anxious. They waited for dawn. It felt like a lifetime of waiting for Maple. Like many other leaves, she hoped the tree could provide some answer and guidance to what they experienced. But, as the sun rose high into the sky, warming the tree’s trunk and providing the leaves with work to do, the panic was forgotten, and the tree wasn’t interested in giving them an answer, if it even had one.
Cycles came and went. The random chilly nights became a regular part of living, even as they became more frequent. There was a change in energy among the plants and animals in the forest. Everything felt like it was slowing down. Maple sensed a sort of preparation for something in the future. It felt like the day cycle was shorter than she remembered, and the sun was lower in the sky. She wasn’t the only one to notice, but there was no consensus among the leaves if this was true. The tree continued to appear unconcerned with such matters, so most accepted it as just another part of life they hadn’t yet understood.
It was a dark morning. The ridge on the other side of the valley still hid the sun. Maple could see the vapor float from the squirrels' breaths as they hovered on a neighboring branch. She sensed an uneasiness emerging from the tree’s north-facing side of leaves. As the sun began to peak above the ridge, she saw the reason for it: leaves had turned yellow. YELLOW LEAVES! A whole patch of leaves was yellow and hadn’t stopped there. Beyond the patch of yellow leaves were even more leaves whose green blades were desaturated and sickly. Maple looked around the forest. There were many newly formed patches of discoloration across the treetops. It was an infection, and it appeared no one would be safe.
The leaves pleaded and begged their mother tree for answers, but none were given. The tree only desired to feed and live. Fear spread throughout the forest as a rumor floated on a chilly breeze from leaf to leaf. Some pine needles from a Douglas Fir insisted that this discoloration was normal. They even dared to breathe upon the wind that all the leaves would be on the ground before the coldest cycle began. LEAVES. ON THE GROUND? Maple had noticed the dull, rusted colors scattered across the forest floor and hidden below saplings and brush, but she couldn’t believe they were leaves! What purpose could a leaf serve on the ground? Are they dead leaves? Do leaves even die? These rumors scared Maple, not just because of the ramifications of whether they were true but because of where they originated. Evergreens were not one to spread lies.
The yellow infection proliferated from the north of the tree to the east, then to the west, and finally to the south. The green of the forest faded to red, orange, and yellow. Maple, and the leaves on her branch were still mostly green, but their blades had faded. She felt sluggish, and the forest felt like it was slowly silencing. Fewer birds were singing. The familiar buzz of insects was gone. The beehives were now empty and silent. Maple would be discolored like the rest soon enough. She knew it and feared this meant the rest of the forest and her were dying.
Maple was angry at her tree for letting her die and remaining silent. She was angry at the sun for hanging low in the sky and hiding behind ridges and clouds. She hated the evergreens for saying such awful things.
Nights were colder. The wind was more bitter. The forest was now a stranger to Maple. Shades of red, yellow, and orange dominated the ridges and the valley. Leaves fell, creating a new carpet of their corpses on the forest floor. Her blade was a rusted yellow and brittle. Her fate was sealed. Watching her friends go was even worse than waiting for her turn to fall from her perch. Chewed was the first, and then it was Sugar. Both were torn from the branch and flung across space and time until they met their demise somewhere beyond the tree. Maple never dreamed of dying. She desperately wanted not to.
First, she demanded answers from the tree, and then she begged and pleaded. But it stayed quiet behind its thick bark. She felt abandoned. Her tree gave her life. Now, it sat there in silence, unmoved by the scary and changing world.
There were barely any leaves left on any trees. Only the evergreens showed signs of life with their green needles coating their branches. They looked smug in their defiance of death. Maple hated them now. Everything else was grey and desolate. Maple felt deeply cold and brittle. She wished she was a needle on an evergreen tree. She wished she could hang onto her tree forever but knew she didn’t have the strength to last the following harsh wind.
In the far distance, on the crest of a ridge that ran parallel, a firm wind brushed against the bare tops of the Birch, Oak, and Elms that once thrived there. Maple knew that would be the wind that would take her from her perch. It may take an hour, or four, but the wind would arrive and end her reign on one of the tallest branches of her maple tree. She missed her friends. She missed the warm cycles of sun and rain. She wasn’t ready to go.
The Sun set in the late autumn sky, glowing reddish pink on the horizon and reflecting on the clouds. It may have been the prettiest sunset Maple ever saw. The rustling of bare branches and fallen leaves gave her warning. She felt her tree bracing for the wind’s impact. The squirrels stopped prancing on a neighboring tree and looked at the oncoming assault with stupid curiosity. They darted as the gust pushed through, and Maple flung from her perch and glided in the air. It didn’t even hurt. She twirled and fluttered. Is this what flying felt like? She flopped and skirted. She was smashed against a neighboring tree and felt pieces of her blade break. The cold wind blew through the holes those pieces left behind.
She came to rest at a large root, diving deep into the topsoil and rot. It was a root of her tree. The tree that shed her and told her nothing about the purpose of this suffering. Maple looked up into the dark night sky and wondered what it would feel like to die. Would it be painful? Would she even know when it happened? She wanted to ask the tree one last time. Was the tree going to die, too? If so, she wanted it to suffer, just like her. She was alone and nestled among strange leaves. She assumed they were as afraid as she was about meeting one’s end.
The anger arrived again. Maple watched the squirrels frolic from one branch to another, shaking the branch she once called home. She hated them for their freedom and apparent joy. Rays of the cold sunshine fell on the trunks and barren branches of the forest but left her in the dark. She despised its decision to no longer reach her aching blade crumbling on the ground. She cursed her tree for ever bringing her to life. She cursed life itself. How could something be so beautiful and cruel? What purpose could this suffering serve? Maple decided that all of it was so stupid.
She was pelted by cold rain. Deer trodded on her without any notice. The squirrels shoved her around as they dug for forgotten stores of food. Millipedes scurried across, and a skunk sprayed her when it was frightened by the snap of a stick in the depths of night. Cycles came and went as pieces of Maple broke and crumbled into the dirt. Yet, she had not vanquished. Perhaps it was a cruel joke that fate, life, or whatever it was that kept her alive to witness her slow demise.
A boot of a human slammed her deeper into the mud and the filth. She watched the human drag away a dead deer. The blood splashed on her as they pushed past. A bird fell from the sky and landed near here. It was dead. Its lifeless eyes stared at the pile of leaves, dirt, and rot where Maple was stuck.
She was cold. So cold she could no longer distinguish herself from the rest of the forest floor. White crystals fell from the sky. Delicately, they formed a layer across the ground and slowly buried Maple under it. As the cycles came and went, the crystals layered deeper and deeper. She lost all sense of the world above her—the feel of the air blocked by the suffocating layers of frozen water.
Maple only felt the cold wetness of the ice crystals and, sometimes, a slight trickle of freezing water sliding down her deteriorating midrib. Life around her was silent. She wondered when death would finally take her as time turned into a meaningless measure. She feared the pain and terror of its grip.
There was a river of water running down on top and through Maple. She felt a familiar heat slowly burn through the ice crystals above her. The tender rays of the sun pierced through the depths of ice and illuminated Maple’s crippled body. It was a joy and a comfort to feel the sun again.
Cycles came and went as the forest changed. Green sprouts emerged from the ground, pushing past Maple. New grasses grew taller, and saplings towered over her—mushrooms formed on rotting logs and the forest floor. As she absorbed into the earth, undetectable pieces breaking away from her, she saw new leaves emerge from the tree she once called home. She glared at the branch where she once hung as another leaf expanded from her former perch. SHE WAS REPLACED! The cruelty! The world was going to go on living without her. Why wasn’t she allowed to join it?
Maple was hysterical. She longed to go back and live in happier times. If she had legs to stand on and arms to crawl, no matter how feeble, she would have found a way to cut down her tree. Show it how much it had hurt her. Darker thoughts entered Maple’s mind. She debated, what was even the point of existing if it only doomed her to rot among the insects and the dirt? She wanted to feel the breeze again—feel the air pour through her and embed itself from her blade to the tree's limbs and roots. She missed the rain drying off her in the sun and the squirrels shaking her branch. She missed feeling a part of the chorus of birds as they sang from the treetops. All of it was there for others to enjoy while she withered.
She watched the bees build their hives again. The deer had baby fawns to care for, and the squirrels of her tree were now three instead of two. The forest had come alive with the buzz of insects, the blooming of flowers, and a new generation of animals and plants inheriting the beautiful world.
The bird’s corpse slowly decomposed in front of her. The maggots, scavengers, and bacteria took all the nutrients its lifeless body could provide. The mushrooms appeared to be slowly digesting the rotting logs they sprouted on.
Maple bore witness to the cycle of thriving new life, and she survived long enough to see its end again. The same abrupt fall from grace as the mushrooms withered, the leaves changed color and fell from their perches in the sky. She wasn’t much now, just a few pieces loosely tied together by her fragile midrib and petiole. The animals were quiet again as the bitterly cold nights returned. The ice crystals fell from the sky and blanketed the ground. The trees were once again bare, and Maple enjoyed the peace of the forest’s slumber.
As before, this cycle of cold and ice ended and made way for the cycle of new life. Baby animals were born that will one day replace their parents. Fresh leaves sprouted from the barren trees, and mushrooms formed again to decompose the logs they inhabited slowly. Everything, even in death, had its purpose. Maple crinkled as she watched the new leaves stretch their blades and take in the morning sun. Her final pieces broke apart and mixed with the organic matter built from the countless cycles of life and death. She wished she could have told the new leaves it was okay when their time came. There could be joy in the end as much as there was in the beginning, and they should cherish all they had. She wished she could tell them their bodies would become part of an entire ecosystem built off endings that would fuel new beginnings.
Maple no longer cared what the pieces of her would be. She had no fear as her consciousness slipped. She died happy, knowing life was good.