The perfect tree

I love the fall season. I enjoy the crisp-aired evenings, football, the colder nights, dusting off leather jackets and I especially love the wardrobe change that trees and other foliage puts on and then takes off for us.

Each weekday morning I drive my kids to school and after navigate the great loop that allows me to drop them off and then exit the school grounds to head home, I pass by the perfect tree. It is located on the corner spot of a corner house as I wind down neighborhood streets to get back home. It is only about six feet tall and slender, yet full. It had clearly been well watered all summer.

Each morning of October and part of November, after enjoying the idea of sending my kids off to learn and experience, I would marvel at this tree. Its leaves were of many colors, changing from week-to-week, including some deep purples edging to dark blue, bright racing-car reds, blazing oranges and sunny yellows. I enjoyed the tree in all its subtle shades every day for a month or longer. Most days I thought that on the following day I would bring my camera, stop the car and get out and wait for some perfect light for this perfect tree.

I never did, but now when I drive by it with its naked, frozen twigs and branches, I still can recall the brilliance of that little tree. (Next year, maybe even this spring, I will spend 30 minutes to get the right image.)

I genuinely believe in a loving God and also genuinely believe that he engineered creation as a teaching tool for his most beloved creation: his children. Fall is an obvious reminder of our own mortality. We watch our own cycle of life play out before us multiple times before our own leaves fall and before our own sap stops circulating.

My mother has cancer that will eventually, hopefully after many cherished years, take her life. She has taken the news in stride and my poor, dear father has diminished mental capacity and cannot support her as one would hope. He lives in a fog and is scared and even angry a lot of the time.

I know my parents well enough to be well aware of their flaws. Like most people, they are complex and secretly vulnerable but when looking on their lives they too have showcased some spectacular leaves of various shades and colors. My dear mother currently is beautifully noble as she copes with fear and loneliness and mortality. She knows, though it may be yet distant, that winter is coming. Her foliage brought on by adversity, less sun and some deep cold snaps, is brilliant.