Terry Marotta:
Falling Ginkgo Leaves Mark Autumn’s End

I guess there’s a different moment for each of us, some unique and remembered signal that glorious autumn is ending at last.

For me it’s what happens just beyond the second-story window where I sit every day, feet on the desk, sometimes unpretzeling paper clips as I look and look out at the day, trying to see what to write for this space.

For me the signal involves a living thing not 15 feet outside this room I have used as an office since I began producing this column fully 26 years ago.

The room was conceived as an upstairs parlor when the house was built in the 1890s, we think, or maybe even as the master bedroom. It has this beautiful fireplace all framed in fawn-colored tiles, which in turn are framed by twin columns that hold aloft a high and graceful mantelpiece.

I feel so lucky to be able to work in such a space with its three wide windows.

It nestles directly under the turret that perches atop the creaky old structure we call home, so that its front-facing wall curves outward and that wall's windows too, with glass all old and wiggly.

We're so afraid of breaking the old glass we hardly dare touch the ivy that covers it, scaling the turret each year with all the eager zest of Rapunzel’s boyfriend.

In summer, it creeps clear across the screens of all three windows, making me feel I write from inside a tree house.

In autumn though, the shiny ivy leaves fall to the cold-blowing winds and I can really SEE the harbinger of winter that I speak of here.

It is a tree, one of the oldest God invented, as we have been told both by the professionals and by the amateur arborists who have walked past and stopped to remark on it.

It is a ginkgo, whose small fan-shaped leaves seem to grow directly out of its trunk, like some fantastical creature that has fingers springing straight from its shoulders.

 Thus, in the season of life, the shadow it casts is sparse and not dark and dense like the maple’s.

It’s really the shadow that tells me of the great change we all face now. 

The ginkgo holds its leaves longer than any other tree save the oak, and when it loses them it loses them all at once.

Thus, when I sat down to write here this morning, its still-green leaves made a lacy veil that hung between me and the peachy light of dawn.

Then a soft but continuous rustling sound commenced and I looked out to see that the veil was breaking apart. The strong morning light that poured in on these floorboards suddenly blinked and flickered with movement.

The leaves were coming down, not singly or in ones and twos but by the hundreds; and in the time it has taken me to write these lines every single one has fallen.

A scant two hours ago, in other words, I sat down by this window in a season still leafy with tokens of growth. I rise now in a season when all growth has ended.

 So for me at least, autumn is past.

Today, the final tender tomatoes must be plucked and carried inside. Today the very last of the velvety roses must be picked and nestled into indoor vases.

Because the season of cold is coming, sure enough. And before long the pond’s surface will harden and turn pink in the failing sun, and be sketched upon once again by silent skaters.

 Write Terry at tmarotta@comcast.
net or P.O Box 270, Winchester, Mass., 01890.