“Write about the leaves.”
I hear the sentence in my spirit and set to it. It’s not the flat green blades attached to stems it means. It’s the exits, les sorties (French), the releases, the departures as delicate as the kisses we blow from our fingertips to propel our loved ones on. These are fragile goings; one can’t hold them down or control their flights. Only the wind has the tiniest chance of that.
Flicka got married on June 28 and left. She lives nearby and flits in some days, her presence passing through our front door and out of it again at unexpected times in undetermined moments in the middle of normal days, and I’d like to drop my workload and rake up her words into a sweet pile and jump into them before the breeze steals them all away.
Ricka lives here still but works each day, taking time off to assist at youth camps for a week here or a week over there, winging in and out like the gusts of summer. I see the shimmer of her leaves, their floating in the winds, their landing—uncertain to me but not to her. She knows how they’ll flutter to a rest, and I don’t have to.
Dicka left on July 11 for a two-year commitment with Youth With A Mission (YWAM). She’s on staff this third time around—the winds wafting her to the same place (Kona) where her flight will slow for now. This plan has outreaches in coming months, though, and they’ll toss her and the others she leads to Fiji or Papua New Guinea or Samoa, and we can’t know exactly where yet any more than the leaves of summer know their autumn destination.
Life is a series of leaves. Some call them goodbyes, but do goodbyes turn green or yellow or orange or red or gold and layer a person’s life with changing color and untouchable beauty?
There’s nothing final to these papery fragments that whisper through our days, swirl away, and fly back to land on our lawn again when we least expect them.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka and their husbands Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr.