DASH OF METAPHYSICS ON A BALMY AUTUMN DAY

On one of those balmy late October days I hurried over to the park to check out the acorns. What prompted the trip other than the blue skies, soft breezes and smell of leaves burning somewhere was to see if the acorn crop was abundant, skimpy, or none of the above, i.e. none.

Earlier my sisters and I went for a picnic in the woods to a favorite spot under a huge oak tree. We had the familiar two gallon, orange, plastic, bucket which we intended to fill with acorns. For Lou, having no oak trees in her yard, loves to set the filled bucket in her yard just outside her back picture window and enjoy the squirrels coming and going.

We did not find a single acorn. No hulls. No cups. Something must have happened to the old tree at a particular time in the spring which caused this aberration.

So, over to the nearest park trees I went and was pleased to see acorns everywhere. There'll be no skinny squirrels around here this year.

I sat on an old wooden seated park bench beneath a white oak for a while, listening to acorns fall, one or two a minute, four or five a minute if a little stiffer breeze passed by. Leaves drifted down in slow motion.

One wonders when there is no breeze, what makes a leaf depart its mother tree at the exact time that it does. One last bit of evaporation? One infinitesimal shrinkage? Some outward punch of a bud for next year's leaf?

I picked up a fallen, still waxy leaf, big as my hand, and examined the stem end to see if there was any rough tear or split caused by its separation. It was smooth and rounded just like a socket that had once fit into a part of something else, but now the leaf was an entity unto itself. Not a part of a tree anymore, I supposed.

I wondered if naturalists Thoreau, Teale, or Muir had been sitting there on the bench with me what their thoughts would have been about the inevitable departure of a leaf from a tree that had nurtured it. Or would they say the leaf had nurtured the tree?

Thoreau would probably have picked up a stick and drawn a circular trail on the ground depicting the falling leaf making soil that fed the roots that nourished the tree that made the leaves that gathered sunshine and rain, that eventually fell to make the soil that made, etc. etc.

"So, Henry," I would say, since he's an old friend of mine, via Walden, "when the leaf falls and seemingly becomes a separate entity, it really isn't?"

There seemed to be a sinking in the old wooden seat as if someone else had seated himself or herself there. Of course there wasn't. Probably another acorn falling, but I began to think of who might have liked to join our "spoken" thoughts. Another acorn fell and I exclaimed, almost aloud, "John Donne." John Donne, he who said, "Man is not an island. No one is self sufficient; everyone relies on others." In some semi-disconnected way it seemed to fit in with what we were "saying."

If an acorn hadn't suddenly hit me on the head I think it would have been easy to sit there musing on my Thoreau assigned philosophy and Donne's long past sermon and trail it on out to the conclusion that nothing is a separate entity unto itself. Somewhere, some time, everything was attached to, or related to something else. All is one?

I tried to stop thinking, which is impossible to do unless you are asleep and not dreaming, shut my eyes and just listen. Somewhere in the park of leaf blower was doing its thing attached to a human, of course. There was a skittering sound in the hedgerow a squirrel, no doubt, burying an acorn a squirrel once attached to its mother and now, perchance, burying an acorn which in a few decades down the avenues of time would provide acorns, etc. etc.

The neighborhood dogs were barking. I think they get lonesome in their small pens and the most lonesome one begins the barking to see if the other unseen ones are there. They are.

I carried the leaf home, used it as a coaster for my supper time glass of milk and felt I'd had a great day, almost out of myself, yet still attached.

Do you think that acorn hit me too hard on the head?

REJOICE!