By: Stephanie Reynolds
You step out of your car at the trailhead and breathe in deep. Air — sweet and pungent with the scent of petrichor and dying vegetation — fills your lungs and your soul. You inhale once more, but this time as you exhale in a long, drawn-out sigh, you let your shoulders drop the thousand pounds of the weight of the world that you have been carrying.
And you start to walk.
Each step shakes another care of your life onto the trail to blend and be buried by red, gold, and brown leaves. A gentle breeze swirls playfully, teasing the seasonal dressings of oak and maple a few inches off the trail before you. You keep walking through the breeze and the leaves, mindlessly letting your feet be part of the dance. Do the leaves remember flight? Do they remember floating on the air and settling down to the ground? Are they sad to see themselves turn wrinkled and stiff or are they excited that they got the chance to fly?
When they were green and high in the tree, exalted and strong, they had important business providing food for the tree that bore them. Vigorous and defiant in wind and rain, they grew and stretched and laughed. April was their birth from pregnant branch-buds. In July they drank the sun from the sky and water from the ground to thrive and flourish. Then August came and the water dried up, and the sun grew unbearably hot. Parched and weaker, this was their final hurrah, it appeared, and they were diligent to spend what seemed to be their last useful time taking the brunt of the heat themselves, curling and browning in the unbearable noontime so the animals and tender plants and people could find respite. What an honorable end for a leaf — to burn in the sun, to hold on as long as it can, to provide one more moment of shade to those below.
And then to fall.
Does the leaf mourn this moment? Does it weep to return to the youthful exaltation of being seated in high places? Or does it, in the wisdom that is etched on the brown veins of its skin, realize that this, too, is a time of purpose and beauty? Has the Lord put it in the leaf to look at its vibrant elder colors, now more elegantly red than any June rose, more golden yellow than any buttercup, and find itself beautiful? Did it dread this moment or has it been groaning, longing for this since that last rainless stretch of weather?
How odd it must be for it to remember that, just a brief moment ago, it could withstand the rumbling, clashing, flashing battle of north wind and south, a writhing, ripping cyclone, and now a barely-felt breeze has deftly severed its last tenuous thread to its own tree of life…
And gently let the leaf play and dance in the air, finally unfettered by have-tos and musts…
And softly laid it on the ground to rest.
But is that the end? Is there not more?
Oh, yes, there is so much more! For that leaf, far from being useless and discarded, is the moment of delight for every leaf crunching connoisseur. It provides, for every laughing child who runs and leaps fearlessly toward the autumn sky, a safe landing, protecting the youngling from the hard ground and rocks.
And right now it is waiting to cover your cares that are littering the trail of your heart.
Keep walking forward. Look for its brethren who, by a Providentially timed breeze, are descending to capture your worries in their veins and press them under your feet.
And as you drive away from the trail and return to your days, bathed and refreshed in the glory of His making, those leaves can become a shelter against the harsh winter for the tendrils of hope that sprouted in your soul as you shuffled your feet through the sprinkling of leaves.
It is autumn my amazing Limestonians! It’s high time to get out on our trails and explore the beauty of our area. If you don’t know where to go, come see me — I have short trails and long trails and accessible trails.
And also keep an eye out for some of our events coming up such as the The Fiddler’s Convention on the October 2 through 5, Cemetery Stroll on the 6th of October, and the Storytelling Festival on October 25-26. Then we start out holiday season with our North Pole Tinsel Trail! Contact our office if you want to sponsor a tree this year — it is going to be bigger than ever!
By: Stephanie Reynolds, Athens-Limestone Tourism Association
September 20, 2024
