The Parable of the First Leaf of Fall

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, how is it that one by one my memories drift away, but the azure of the sky on 9-11 is forever with me?”

Josh spoke thus:

A lover of autumn was watching an old dog examine a fallen leaf.  The leaf was green, with hints of scarlet at its serrated edges.

“That’s the first leaf of fall,” the lover of autumn said to the old dog, “Do you remember your first ever leaf of fall?”

The lover of autumn looked at the old dog, its once-basalt coat now a mottled pumice, its muzzle white with wisdom, its eyes clouded with foresight.  The dog’s first leaf of fall had also been one of these first leaves of fall which still cling to summer.  The young dog’s first leaf of fall had not been crayon yellow or traffic-cone orange or popsicle red.  The dog’s first leaf of fall displayed the same weariness that this old dog now shared with what might be the old dog’s last first leaf of fall.

The morning when the young dog had muzzled its first first leaf of fall, the lover of autumn had felt like a puppy too.  By that afternoon, the lover of autumn’s puppy days had ended.

The smoke from the city was unusual that morning, that morning whose sky had been a solid, cloudless blue.  In the sky had hung the expectancy of chilly night and face-warming day.  Into the sky had risen the optimism of skyscrapers thrust from granite.  Into the sky had flown the optimism of migratory wings.  Into the morning had stepped a young lover of autumn and the young lover of autumn’s puppy.

That puppy’s first leaf of fall, of course, was a bit of a cheat.  The calendar said late summer.  The sunrise said not quite equinox.  The red in the leaf was not proper autumn red.  The green in the leaf was still summer green.  But the leaf was a harbinger.  Summer this year would end early.  Fall would come too soon.

The smoke from the city was not mostly wood and was not mostly rubber and was not mostly oil, not mostly coal, not mostly gas, tinder or cinders.  The smoke was mostly--the lover of autumn didn’t know what comprised that smoke.  The smoke, as the lover of autumn saw it, was mostly winter.

“Do you remember when we were puppies?” the lover of autumn asked the old dog, “It was so long ago.  It was forever ago.”

The old dog, partly blind, part faded summer, part early winter, gave its puppy tail one last puppy wag.

The lover of autumn took the first leaf of fall from where the old dog had found it.  The lover of autumn would press the first leaf of fall in the album where the lover of autumn pressed all the lover of autumn’s commemorative first leaves of fall, each with a portrait to measure the years since the morning when the dog and the lover of autumn were last puppies.

“Say cheese,” the lover of autumn said, and the lover of autumn imagined that the old dog looked into the lens and grinned.