I live in a house where an apple tree keeps sending leaf messengers to the doorstep. Beginning in October and continuing as snow falls at the year’s end,
I’ve arrived home to feel the crunch of leaf matter under my feet while I look through my pockets for my keys. For weeks and weeks I’ve been sweeping them up from the front yard to put in the back yard compost bin and still when the wind blows the naked branches seem to divert swirls just right to catch handfuls of leftover leaves and throw them at the door. At first I found I enjoyed sweeping them aside with a stiff broom, and then I couldn’t keep up with them and it began to be a chore because I didn’t always want to sweep before entering the house, and I didn’t want them inside, but finally I felt a kind of balance in progress.
Inside the house is a peaceful dog that daydreams all day of nooks and crannies in the neighborhood. It felt like the bright brain cells of the dog’s imagined pleasure to get out the door for walks was meeting the open curiosity of the apple leaves outside trying to get in the door. Balance happens. Still I wondered if I wouldn’t one day arrive home to find dry leaves in a row on the couch reading my books, leaves traipsing through the kitchen looking to make tea, leaves on the massage table awaiting my two good hands, apple leaves swapping stories with the house plants.
There are no leaves left on the tree but there is one apple hanging on a lower branch and it is shriveling into a wrinkled face. I expect it to speak to me any day now when its skin finally settles into a nose and eyes and mouth.
“What’cher doing for the New Year?” that apple will ask me. “Will you take an old soul downtown for the pine cone drop?”
“Well no, I thought I’d read a good book instead of going out.”
“What are you, a hermit? I’ve been watching you sweep the doorstep for months and you seem kind of fussy.”
“I prefer quiet to crunch.”
“Get a life sweetheart. Risk a little racket.”
So it will go, my New Year will begin with advice from an apple tree and I’ll ignore it and sleep through the celebration and dream of the house filling up with leaves: a bathtub of leaves, whole rooms of leaves so that people passing by will look over at leaf faces against the glass of the windows and wonder what kind of house it is that lets fall in the door to escape winter.
Truly, I do take note of the passing of one year into the next. I consider my intentions; I recall the highs and lows of days gone by, and I slap another journal on the shelf and choose a new pen to start the next one. In the still small hours of the predawn as the year begins, I’ll listen for inspiration. I’m committed to one vision already: I filled one small cardboard box with apple tree leaves and hid it from the wind in the back of my truck. I’m imagining a snow creature I’ll make in January: a stout round gal with a stick for a grin and a dried apple nose and two buttons for eyes and a hairdo that crackles with brown and yellow leaves combed just so.
“How do you like 2011?” I’ll ask her. “Do you think it will be a good year?”
“I don’t know. I want a hot bath, I want a cup of tea, I want a massage,” she’ll say. “Read me a book, do you have any good jig saw puzzles? Isn’t there a crossword from the Times around here?”
“Hey that’s my good life!”
“Why do you think I’m on your doorstep lady!”
She’ll wink and my heart will melt, or hers will, and wantonly the days will fly by; eagerly, another year will whirl along until the months again hurl leaves to scratch against the door with their many tiny messages of let me in, let me in.
