A Moment of Time
by Calvin Peters
Two days ago I looked out the back door and noticed the Mountain Ash. It has always been there, but this time I really SAW it. Not the tree so much, as the colour of the leaves. As I looked at the tree I knew I had just discovered my ‘new’ favourite colour. It’s funny how sometimes you can look at things hundreds of times and not really notice them, until something grabs your attention.
I tried to think of how I could describe that colour to others, if need be. It was a really neat colour, if I have ever seen it before, it certainly didn’t register. It was a kind of a cross between patina, rust, orange, yellow and (gasp) pink. Not all the leaves were that colour, and no one leaf was that entire colour. It was just a tone that washed over the tree and created almost a “feeling” you know, like the odd time when you are out bow hunting in the fall and the sun shines a little different and you kind of catch your breath and just FEEL the mood?
I thought about what that colour was, and how this feeling was a combination of the fall…colder air, the tug at my heart to stay outside and hunt, and shoot my bow outside until I cant see the arrows any more. Even then I don’t want to go inside. It’s as if on some subconscious level I know it will soon be winter, and if I can’t be out bowhunting, at least I should be OUTSIDE!
But the colour…. the colour was some kind of key to my season. A realization of change that always comes. Just like life. If we live to see it, there will be winter. And of course then the spring will be here again, and re-birth and cycle will go on. But I wanted to “capture” that feeling, that mood. I thought about taking some leaves and saving them, perhaps to remember the autumn and keep it close so that through the winter so I’ll have a memory of my hunting season. But somehow I knew I couldn’t ever “possess” that feeling.
Isn’t it true that at the passing of a loved one, or even a pet, that you can hold the remnants of their time here, but you just KNOW the spirit is gone? You just KNOW things are different somehow? It was in that way that I knew that if I preserved the leaves in a book or something, that spirit wouldn’t be there; I would be holding a shell of what IT was. The mortal remains of something on a higher level, one of which I do not understand.
But anyways, this morning I walked outside and the leaves were gone. Not all gone, there was a few stragglers, but it was eerie how 98% of the leaves just VACATED over night. Like a herd of caribou on a migration, you think they will always be there, but when they aren’t, it is creepy in the whole EMPTINESS of the thing. You know what I mean? Sort of like a school classroom in the middle of summer holidays. The things that belong there are no longer there.
In the next day or two, the leaves will be all gone. The colour already is.
It only lasted a moment of time.
But on the bright side, I now have a new favourite colour, and lots of work to do.
Winter is coming.
Topic: A Moment of Time - Calvin Peters (Read 2936 times)
