Sunday Morning Leaves

This morning, fallen leaves lie deep along the dewy trail, drifting down from high places to gift themselves to the early wanderer and the patient observer in the park. No two leaves are alike in the pale sunlight and cool September wind, but they are a community for all that, a community of the errant, the wayward and the fallen.

The leaves are dancing in their places, and they ripple and billow like the sails of an old barge going carefully up the river at twilight. They make a dry rustling music that whispers of the turning seasons, of waning light and change - they sing of a fine and crunching frost below my feet, of bare branches glistening overhead, some time very soon.