Leaf people in late fall

I'm in Vermont, hiding out at the cafe above the bookstore.

Earlier, I was at my house listening to the autumn rain on the metal roof, loading logs into the woodstove and staring at the orange intensity behind the glass. When I come up here and embed myself in the quiet, the wheels in my head turn differently. I don't know so much if it's wishing to live deliberately or just discovering that in the quiet, slow pace of this life, and in the solitude that wraps itself around me on the mountain, that deliberatation is inevitable. Shaking myself out of it and realizing that I'd accomplished nothing all morning because I stop and think about things rather than just doing them, I loaded the dogs into the car and came to town. I figured that if civilization didn't restore me to the innured state I usually experience, a triple shot latte would at leave revv my engines into a higher gear.

But, deliberate or not, today the drive down the mountain seemed to go in slow motion. Today is weighted with the aching descent of late fall into winter, and each tree, sad and wet as if its waiting for a bus without an umbrella, filled me with acknowledgement of our human condition of longing. Or at least, my human condition of longing.

Today is crisp with a new cold, and forlorn piles of shriveled leaves gather like the homeless outside a subway station asking for spare change. Grass appears uncertain. Should it persever in being green, in growing? There's a beauty to all this that cuts me. Change, decision-- things turning a corner.

Dunno. The church bells outside are ringing against the cafe's Gypsy King music. And at the end of the room, the window is open and the drumming of the rain patters through the top of maple tree pressed against the glass. A few orange leaves cling to the upper branches like guests who won't go home.

In this town (the big one, population 4,000, that's next to my town of 243)-- there's a tradition called "Leaf People."
In October, people bring the leaves they've raked and dump them in the town square, where the children, supervised by the 147 artists who live in this town (no joke)- stuff old clothes and create scarecrows which are hung around the town-- in front of shops, where you'd expect them, and at the edges of town, like one masquerading as a hitch-hiker which has year after year surprised me when my headlights hit it.
There's something very T.S. Eliot about it, very "We are the hollow men." But then, I've been accused of being rather dark sometimes.

It's just for the tourists, not a grim reminder of mortality.

And frankly, I don't find anything all that grim about mortality. As Patch Adams said (or at least as Robin Williams said in his role of Patch Adams)-- "What's wrong with death?"

At the moment, the only thing I can think of that's really objectionable about death is that it might take us away from all this beauty. This change, the heartbreaking quality of fall seceding into winter, of youth conceding to middle age, of life taking these turns so that every day is different from the one before in small, unimaginable ways. What an amazing process. Does death put all that to a screeching halt? Are there degrees of being dead? Because I'm not sure that the same thing over and over again would have the same impact.

But then again, life surprises me. Repeatedly, like the damn leaf hitchhiker. It always gets me, leaves me chuckling that I fell for it, again. Maybe death will be just as mystifying in the best of ways, like someone we love but have never really figured out.